UCAR's Program for the Advancement of Geoscience Education (PAGE) is embarking on a project that will create a prototype Geoscience Community Resource Discovery System. The main objectives of the project are to:
· Establish a prototype index/catalog/search engine system that will give users a central site where they can search for and contribute to geosciences course materials that may reside at any of the participating institutions as well as at the central site.
· Demonstrate that the catalog/search facility can be used to index geosciences course materials housed at university World Wide Web sites as well as those at the central site.
· Start the online collection with components of the UCAR/COMET ® learning modules and ensure that the tools will be useful in the broader geoscience community by establishing partnerships with organizations in other geoscience disciplines, which have similar collections of multimedia materials.
The project is being conducted as part of a joint effort by COMET, Unidata, and PAGE to provide a set of convenient information access tools for the communities they serve. The PAGE portion of the effort is funded by a grant from the NSF Geosciences Directorate. This paper will report on the status and accomplishments of the project to date.