National Science Digital Library PO Box 3000 Boulder, CO 80403 (303) 497-2946 fax: (303) 497-8336 www.nsdl.org

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a digital library of resource collections and services, organized in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education at all levels. Starting with a partnership of NSDL-funded projects, NSDL is emerging as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education, and a community center for groups focused on digital-library-enabled teaching and learning. NSDL provides an organized point of access to collections and services from resource contributors that represent the best of both public and private institutions including universities, museums, commercial publishers, government agencies, and professional societies. NSDL supports education and research at all levels, from preschool through adult, with materials ranging from journal articles and lesson plans to interactive animations, and from real-time data sets and technology-based tools to ask-an-expert services.

Initial development of NSDL began in late 1995 with an internal concept paper for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Undergraduate Education. In 1996, NSF released a report about ways to improve undergraduate STEM education. It recommended establishing a national digital library that would constitute an online network of learning environments for improving teaching and learning for STEM education at all levels. Beginning in 1998, two rounds of prototype projects were supported. In 2000 the NSDL program began to develop the technical infrastructure of the Library, coordinate access to resources from a wide range of providers, and to build relationships with key stakeholders in the research, education, library, and publishing communities. Access to aggregated collections and services began with the launch of the NSDL.org website in December 2002. To date, nearly 160 projects have been funded to create collections and services for teachers and learners at all levels, and perform targeted research in digital libraries and their application to education. NSDL's most recent initiative is the implementation of specialized portals targeted to meet the needs of specific audiences. A Middle School Portal developed in collaboration with Eisenhower National Clearinghouse is now available and portals for community colleges (with the Internet Scout Project), K-12 multimedia resources (with WGBH Teachers' Domain), undergraduate math (with the Mathematical Association of America), and computational science (with the Shodor Foundation) are in development.