Cornell National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Researchers Win Best Paper Award
Award presented at 2006 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
Ithaca, NY – July 6, 2006 – Researchers from Cornell University’s National Science Digital Library group, Carl Lagoze, Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Naomi Dushay, Dean Eckstrom and John Saylor have won the Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at the 2006 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) held in Chapel Hill, NC. The $1,000 award was sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their paper Metadata Aggregation and "Automated Digital Libraries": A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience.
The Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award is given to the best paper presented at the JCDL. All full papers that are accepted for presentation are eligible and the JCDL Steering Committee selects the winner.
Lagoze, Krafft, Cornwell, Dushay, Eckstrom, and Saylor are all part of a 15 member Cornell team that conducts research as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project. The NSDL team is part of Cornell’s Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). The project aims to enhance all aspects of education in science, mathematics and engineering by creating tools and communities around a digital library of selected, high-quality resources. The Cornell team both develops the software infrastructure and operates the production library, which is available online at http://nsdl.org.
In presenting the paper Lagoze commented that it reported on "A lot of hard work by many smart people." His talk reviewed both the successes and the lessons learned during the creation and operation of the NSDL digital library over the past three years. Lagoze’s talk analyzed the practical results of the architectural choices made at the beginning of the project. He suggested that the results reported in the paper should lead to collaborative discussion in the digital library community about future work on the generation and collection of metadata (data that describes other data).
The paper concluded that while the initial NSDL architecture led to successful deployment of a production digital library, the human effort costs were inordinately high and the potential benefits gained from structured metadata were compromised by lack of quality and incompleteness. Based on the experiences reported in this paper, the NSDL team at Cornell has developed and implemented a completely new architecture for the NSDL central repository, which addresses many of the shortcomings of the first version. The new architecture will be in full production by late summer 2006.
About Cornell Computing and Information Science
The Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS) at Cornell brings together faculty throughout the university—from Anthropology, Astronomy, Aerospace Engineering, Biology, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, History, Mathematics, Operations Research, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, and the social sciences and humanities. Twenty-five academic departments cross-list courses with CIS.About the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
The JCDL is an annual, international conference focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical and social issues. (http://www.jcdl.org)