The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a community-based geoscience facility to foster inquiry- and discovery-based learning about the Earth by educators and students. To meet this goal, the DLESE community is developing:

- Collections of high quality materials for instruction at all levels covering all components of the Earth system

- Access to Earth data sets and imagery

- Support services to help users create and use materials

- A community center to facilitate interaction and collaboration across all interests of Earth system education

To understand DLESE, consider the situation of this community user:

"Kim, an introductory earth science teacher, needs pedagogical help and instructional material for teaching global climate change and deep time. She would like to locate tutorials, real-time data sets, archival resources, exercises, potential project ideas, and pedagogical assistance. She also wants to know what resources support the National Science Education Standards."

In order for Kim to find the most appropriate and useful Earth system web resources she needs more information than typical search engines or portal sites can provide. Kim wants to know if resources meet the science standards and how she can use resources in her classroom. Since most search engines return one or two sentences from a resource's body of text, Kim's questions will go unanswered. If Kim were able to search a digital library of Earth system resources like DLESE, she would have a better chance of finding resources that meet her needs. Thus, this paper seeks to engage further community involvement in the development, use and evaluation of DLESE as a practical classroom tool for educators and students.