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Science Technology

NSF Works Toward A Digital Science Library 65

Posted by timothy from the what-the-internet-is-for dept.
An anonymous reader writes "USA Today has an article on the effort of 'More than 100 teams of educators nationwide are working with the National Science Foundation to develop what they hope will be the nation's most comprehensive digital library for the sciences.'" The article describes this library as intended to "support science education at all levels, from pre-kindergarten through postdoctoral research."
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NSF Works Toward A Digital Science Library More

NSF Works Toward A Digital Science Library

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  • Is my dream... (Score:3, Funny)

    by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:03PM (#5015822) Journal
    *finally* coming true? At my US taxpayers expense? Thanks, slashdot, I'm gonna keep an eye on this one!

  • Excellent (Score:3, Funny)

    by Boss, Pointy Haired ( 537010 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:03PM (#5015824)
    Now can someone send the URL of their search page to the USPTO!

  • MIT anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:03PM (#5015825)
    Of course, you will have to get background checks to make sure you are completely american.
    "Hey check this guy out. One of his great-grandparents come from France"
    "Terrorist. Notifiy CIA"

  • database of everything (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crossconnects ( 140996 ) <crossconnects @ g m a il.com> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:04PM (#5015832) Homepage Journal
    The internet is supposed to be an interactive database of everything Classic art and Literature, science, etc.

  • GOOGLE can do this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SniffleBear ( 604984 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:06PM (#5015834)
    Ermmm... that digital library is basically a search engine for the sciences. And all it does is give you links to other sites. I can find the same information and more with GOOGLE. So what's the difference?

    What a waste of funding, eh?

    • Re:GOOGLE can do this (Score:4, Informative)

      by resiak ( 583703 ) <willNO@SPAMwillthompson.co.uk> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:09PM (#5015851)
      The difference, my friend, is that Google does not rate the accuracy of the content it links to. Sure, they work out how frequently it is linked to, and they have those little rating buttons on the browser bar in IE, but ultimately, you have no idea how reliable the information you find with Google is.

      • Re:GOOGLE can do this (Score:4, Interesting)

        by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:11PM (#5016098) Journal
        The difference is also one of convenience, accuracy (as far as possible, given the media), and using your tax dollar as it was originally intended: "...to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts..." ... sort of like the original ARPAnet, I think. Not the massive hype engine we have today. Not like the Corporate conglonerate wet dream for Marketing. Not for spammers. Not for millions of unused personal web pages, still under construction. Mainly, the difference is one of intent and quality of content, howver subjective those may be.

    • Re:GOOGLE can do this (Score:5, Interesting)

      by steeleye_brad ( 638310 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:11PM (#5015857)
      From what I've read in the article, it appears that this is more filtered, somehow. Do a search on Google and there is a good chance you will end up with several crap sites with no information. This digital library is (suposedly) pure information, no fluff.

      It looks really promising to me. Hopefully this will be implemented well in schools.

      Oh yeah, and in Soviet Russia, LIBRARIES DIGITALIZE YOU! (couldn't help myself)
    • You're Canadian aren't you ;-)
  • But how many Libraries of Congress will it be?

  • On the subject (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:15PM (#5015867)
    There is an open project currently underway to create an open encyclopedia avalible for all that I and several hundred others are currently working on,It's called the wikipedia, It uses the wiki-docuemntation system to create a collabarated pool of knowledge!

    Anyone can help, so if you got a bit of knowlege thats not in there, add it to the book. Its constant proofreading gives the articles a very high and consistent value.

    You can find it here [wikipedia.org]

  • There already is... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Maria D ( 264552 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:16PM (#5015874) Homepage
    ..something of that sort for mathematics on The Math Forum [mathforum.org] It works moderately well. If you want an answer to a well-defined question, go there.

    There is always a tension between linear, or nested, or hierarchical... still "linear-like" :-) nature of those databases and general non-linearity of the field. I do not quite know where this thought is going, but I hope someone will elaborate :-)
  • Wonderful, now we all (or nobody cuz congress will probably lock it up tight for having sesetive information like how to make a nuke) can find out stuff like the thermal breakdown of carcinogens in hydrodyanmic 5th dimensional space! Or why is the sky blue.

    I'm pretty sure not many people would complain/yawn if 100 teams of people were making the world's largest pr0n database! Everyone could contribute to that, in one way or another.

    Science: if it's not in a "scientific" calculator you don't need to know it!
  • The database side, and the search engine!

  • Won't there be problems... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:40PM (#5015979) Homepage Journal
    ... with states that mandate Creation education in public schools?

    I personally think the idea is good, but when states can mandate that schools use science books that teach Creationism, then either the database will be required to conform (very bad), the schools will not be able to use the database (bad), or the students will have the fun of laughing at their state legislators who mandated that the schools teach bad science (best possible result).

    Then again, I could be wrong. God may smite me with a bolt of lightning today and call me to task for my words. I don't expect it, but then I wouldn't would I?

    -Rusty

  • Need for a digital National Science Library (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dukeofshadows ( 607689 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:41PM (#5015982) Journal
    One of the greatest impediments to independent research is inaccessibility to current journals. Unless tied to a major university or a wealthy backer, it is very expensive tp keep up with current research since most of the technical journals are private and rather expensive. The Library of Congress should be used to facilitate a digital archive of current research (maybe allowing a few weeks for publishers to make money first?) in order to promote more independent scientific research. I work in a cancer research lab over the summers and have personally experienced the frustration of tracking papers only to find that my employer does not have a hard copy and does not subscribe to the electronic edition. Does anyone else have similar stories that they care to share?
    • Such problems can usualy be solved through interlibrary loaning (ILL), which involves faxing copies of required articles.

      However, ILL can take days, when you need the article within minutes!

      A central digital library for mathematics and science papers would greatly improve the productivity of research, worldwide!
    • For physics and math, just about all new research goes through arxiv.org first.

      The dirty little secret is that few people actually read the physics journals anymore, but publishing in a peer reviewed journal is still important, so universities still subscribe.

      The situation isn't as nice for the biological sciences, but PubMed www.pubmed.org is pretty good.
    • I agree that the creation of a National Science Library is necessity. Unless you are under the aegis of a large university or sucessful professor, your access to scientific journals is severely limited. When I look up papers online I spend half the time chasing down a password for whatever journal its in. If you want to read anything published before 93 you are in an even deeper quagmire, as you pretty much have to have the hard copy on hand. The only journal that I know of that has made all of its issues available without charge online is PNAS(back to like 1903). If only scinece and nature could follow suit.
    • Journal inaccessibility is one roadblock for researchers, another is easy and quick access to research data. What if you were able to see research data as it's being produced? That combined with easy access to journal articles, like supplied by the physics eprint archive [arxiv.org], would certainly improve the research environment. One of the NSDL collections, the Atmospheric Visualization Collection [arm.gov], allow users to visually explore near real time atmospheric research data for just this purpose.

  • First, I thought the museum would be redundant... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dagg ( 153577 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @06:44PM (#5015993) Journal
    But then I read:

    "The idea is to come to the NSDL, where you could find some good brain pictures and know where they came from," Saylor said. "They would have a certain level of authority. Every collection is identified for the user."

    If they can pull that off, then the library could be very interesting.

  • From the article:
    "If someone were teaching a course on the brain in high school science, for example, and wanted to find good pictures of the brain, well, they're all over the place," said John Saylor, director of collection development for the NSDL and director on leave from Cornell's engineering library.

    "The idea is to come to the NSDL, where you could find some good brain pictures and know where they came from," Saylor said. "They would have a certain level of authority. Every collection is identified for the user."

    So it's going to be a collection of information approved by government-funded experts. While this is a good idea and has its uses, I question the assumption that this is what the internet is for.

    To me, the internet should be about the free exchange of information, and individuals making their own decisions about what is appropriate.

  • This is quite cool, (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sstory ( 538486 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:21PM (#5016146) Homepage
    Because it raises the possibility of having the Ultimate Textbook. It is currently arduous to find comprehensive, well-developed resources for science. That's why 97% of my undergrad physics education is being done with dead-tree technology, and 3% is being done with email, mathematica, physlink, etc. This is the second recent big step in the right direction, the first being MIT's recent program. Soon, teachers and students will have quicker access to the meat, without being forced to endure a deluge of thousands of indistinct links, etc.

  • The problem is teachers. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:26PM (#5016182) Homepage
    The problem with K-12 science education in the U.S. is that they can't hire enough teachers who know about math and science. Until they get around that bottleneck, nothing is going to improve. Right now, a very high percentage of math and science teachers are people who have no bachelor's degree in math or science. They're often PE teachers who got tired of throwing out balls.

    Experience has shown over and over again that you can create wonderful science books, lab curricula, etc., but they won't work well in the classroom if the teachers are unqualified.

    There are two things that need to change: (1) K-12 math and science teachers need to get paid more money, so that the career is competitive with the other job options available to a person with a math or science degree. (2) States need to get more serious about having high expectations for students. Right now, students tend to limp through lots of math courses without having the faintest idea of what they're doing. That makes it a pretty unattractive career if you're thinking od teaching high-school math: you get a bunch of students who aren't ready to do the stuff you're supposed to be teaching them.

  • 100 Teams? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Stoptional ( 469673 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:56PM (#5016319) Homepage Journal
    Yikes - they should have a look at Project Gutenberg [promo.net] to see how a Digital Library is built - cheap, effective and very accessible. Now there is a Digital Library worthy of the name.

  • Intellectual Property (Score:3, Informative)

    by Josuah ( 26407 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:11PM (#5016395) Homepage
    So, who owns the rights to this information? I understand that government research becomes public domain (i.e. no copyright) if it is published, but that's not necessarily true about government funded programs. Submitting your research, information, or paper to a publication usually gives copyright to the publication. Will the same hold true here? I hope not. And that same sort of stuff when done as a student or faculty member of an educational institution usually gives the institution the copyrights. If these educators submit information, does the repository get the copyrights or does it remain with the institution (requiring the institution's permission for inclusion in the repository)?

  • Best Free Computer Science Digital Library (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:04PM (#5016947)
    Citeseer [nec.com] is the best free computer science digital library. Every computer scientist should have that site bookmarked!

  • My Project (Score:2, Interesting)

    by soulcuttr ( 555929 )
    Interesting, my company [utah.edu] is involved in a grant with the National Science Foundation [nsf.gov] to produce a multimedia database [healcentral.org] primarily for medical information which is all professionally cataloged so as to accept/reject submitted multimedia based on the quality and accuracy of the information the contributor provides. Anyway the goal is to give educators and students a place to share and find information with 100% signal, and no noise. It uses an established, focused, and standard vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings [nih.gov]) as well as the usual keyword-based searching.

    Reinventing the wheel, it seems (sigh).

    -Sou|cuttr

  • a REAL e-library... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    can be found at www.ulib.org [cmu.edu]. The Universal Library will have a million books online within a few years, and many more after that. Check it out yo!

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