This essay is a personal reflection on how early decisions shaped the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and how the program has evolved over the past decade. It draws heavily on observations from the planning studies in 1997 and 1998, and my experience as principal investigator of the Cornell University's part of the Core Integration team until 2005. The thoughts expressed here are purely...

A key question we in America face today is whether or not the information superhighway will reinforce the best values of our society or, instead, will perpetually promise more than it can deliver as a communication medium. At first glance, the new interactive multimedia world we are entering would seem to engage the active mind in intellectual calisthenics and engender the creative use of infor...

Padideh Nasseri, Michael A. Nitsche and Hamed Ekhtiari* 1 Neurocognitive Laboratory, Iranian National Center for Addiction Studies, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 2 Translational Neuroscience Program, Iranian Institute for Cognitive Sciences Studies (ICSS), Tehran, Iran 3 Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, University Medical Center, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, ...

The NSDL (National Science Digital Library) is funded by the National Science Foundation to advance science and math education. The initial product was a metadata-based digital library providing search and access to distributed resources. Our recent work recognizes the importance of context – relations, metadata, annotations – for the pedagogical value of a digital library. This new architectur...