Dean Krafft, director of information technology for the Faculty of Computing and Information Science, spent Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C., explaining Cornell's contribution to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) to a select group of legislators. Krafft, who is the principal investigator for the NSDL Core Integration Project -- the engine that provides access to all of the online library's content -- was one of four panelists who explained the NSDL project to 60 legislators and staff from the House of Representatives STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) caucus.

NSDL, launched five years ago, offers teachers from K-12 through graduate level a wealth of online reference materials and teaching aids for science education. Cornell's Digital Library Group heads the Core Integration Project, under a $1.56 million National Science Foundation Grant. The core system runs on computers at Cornell, but the library's contents are scattered throughout the nation.

Calling the NSDL a "shared collective knowledge base that is being leveraged to create a living library," Krafft said the technology behind the NSDL makes rich explanations of how to use resources possible. Rather than merely describing educational resources, Krafft explained, technology being developed at Cornell for NSDL builds relationships among them to form a "Web of informational context." The architecture is being adopted by countries around the world, he added. The NSDL is reinventing the way that scholars traditionally added valuable context to library holdings by making notations "around the edges" of paper cards in library card catalogs, Krafft said.