NSF’s NSDL Program: An Overview of its History, Progress, and Promise

During the latter part of the 1990s the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided support for a series of workshops to explore and capture the perspectives of a wide variety of potential stakeholders about what a national digital library for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education might “look like,” how it might be supported, who would be the audience, and how it might be sustained. The proceedings of these workshops, their recommendations, and other commentaries were documented in accompanying reports and monographs [1-8]. From these efforts a picture emerged of the digital library as a “learning environments and resources network” for STEM education, with three central features: