The US' National Science Foundation (NSF) is in the process of reducing its support for digital libraries, according to reports from the Science Magazine. The NSF's National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) programme was launched in 2000 to help scientists and science educators make the most of the rapidly expanding online world.
The foundation has spent about $175 million since then to provide organised access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels. In practice, that has meant creating and maintaining a website with a vast assortment of peer-reviewed materials, including lesson plans, videos, lectures, examples and teacher guides; providing support for more than a dozen disciplinary and sector-based portals, called Pathways, that offer suitable content to NSDL; and funding individual research projects that are aimed at helping researchers and educators make better use of online learning.
As NSDL serves several different purposes, the payoff from NSF's investment, which has averaged almost $18 million a year, has been hard to quantify. Its biggest advocates admit that relatively few educators and researchers have even heard of NSDL, much less visited the website or contributed material.
Last year, NSDL was redefined as the National Science Distributed Learning programme and subsumed under a new, broader cyberlearning initiative for which digital libraries are only a small component. In September, NSF cut its support to the organisations that manage NSDL by more than half. In 2007, it had ended its funding of DLESE, a digital library for earth system education that is separate from NSDL but serves as an informal pathway for the earth sciences community.
