A Digital Library for Earth System Education

A primary challenge of Earth system educators is to find appropriate materials in student-friendly formats at a time when general science education is undergoing rapid and systemic changes. These changes include viewing the Earth as an integrated system, using visualizations and simulations, emphasizing pedagogical reform, and expanding the role of Earth sciences in the K-12 curriculum. The Earth system education community has responded to these new opportunities by calling for development of a facility that:

- is interdisciplinary in nature; - allows students and educators to rapidly find resources they need; - provides the training and tools needed to effectively use these materials; and - enables students to explore Earth data.

Earth system educators have convened and articulated a vision and a governance structure for a digital library, a tool to help educators and students readily find high quality, peer-reviewed materials, tools, and information.

Significant progress has been made in this arena in the past year. Leaders from the undergraduate, K-12, and informal Earth system education community, along with the digital libraries and information science communities, are creating the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). DLESE is community-owned, and is being built in a distributed, federated manner. We will demonstrate the current prototypal library and describe how the community can continue to populate, build, and govern the library. Users can contribute to library holdings and find materials according to their specified criteria. They can also link Earth concepts with examples from a particular time or place, with supporting data, and with relevant information on student learning and teaching methods.

The vision of DLESE is to significantly alter ways we learn about the Earth. The goal of this presentation is to enable this greater task by setting forth the plan, the progress to date, and the opportunities for community involvement in this important effort.