FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE Mar. 31, 2009 Contact: Carol Minton Morris, 607 255-2702, or email Additional Information: Web, http://NCore/nsdl.org; Blog, http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/edupak/; Fedora Commons, https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/EduPak/Home; Twitter, http://twitter.com/EduPak; Download, http://downloads.sourceforge.net/nsdl-core/edupak-1.0-rc1.zip NSDL Releases EduPak: An Open Source Digital Library Services Platform for Education
Ithaca, NY, Boulder, CO National educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, conducting educational research, or providing students, teachers and instructors with discipline-oriented pedagogical products and tools require basic technology to build educational digital repositories that support their work. To help meet a national priority expressed by the National Science Board (NSB) in January 11, 2009 recommendations to the Obama Administration in which they stated, "Our national economic prosperity and security require that we remain a world leader in science and technology," the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is pleased to announce the premiere release of NSDL EduPak 1.0. Specifically designed for education, EduPak packages technology for digital storage, access and workflow into a convenient bundle designed to to jump start the essential "behind-the-scenes" framework that enables innovation in teaching and learning. NSDL EduPak 1.0 information, documentation and downloads are available through NSDL (http://ncore.nsdl.org/index.php?menu=services&submenu=services!EduPak) and Fedora Commons (https://fedora -commons.org/confluence/display/EduPak/Home). Download EduPak 1.0 here : http://downloads.sourceforge.net/nsdl-core/edupak-1.0-rc1.zip. NSDL EduPak 1.0 is a publicly available, lightweight version of NCore (http://NCore.nsdl.org), established in 2008 as an open-source digital library platform of technology and standards that create a dynamic information layer on top of library resources. Based on Fedora open source repository software (http://Fedora-Commons.org), NCore provides users, developers, information managers and decision-makers with systems for description, organization, interrelation and annotation of resources. Built using NCore components, EduPak is an all-in-one, open source, education digital repository solution bundle that provides a general platform for building digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications. EduPak services include: NCore Digital Repository: The NCore Digital Repository (NDR) uses Fedora open source repository software version 2.2.4 to model and manage digital objects such as resources, metadata and agents. Fedora provides digital object and repository administrative functions as well as flexible, extensible views of the repository and its digital objects via web services. NCore Collection System: The NCore Collection System (NCS) creates and manages collections of metadata within a DR. The NCS is a flexible XML-driven tool that provides a full-featured metadata editor, collection work flow processes, and a role-based permission system in support of distributed and collaborative collections management. The NCS transparently writes metadata and collection-level information to a DR using the NCore Application Programming Interface (API). Search: The search application consists of the Digital Discovery System (DDS), which provides search and retrieval services for resources that reside in a DR. The service is optimized to support the rapid construction of audience-specific portals and applications and can be flexibly configured to search over any XML schema structure. A range of information retrieval features is available from the service including textual and field-based searches such as audience, subject, resource type or content standard. DDS also supports geospatial search capabilities and can be integrated with Web 2.0 services and APIs such as Google Maps. NCore EduPak may be freely used to create a robust repository with search, harvest, and management components, or to boost current digital library systems. For more information or to download it, please visit: http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/Community:EduPak Future ReleasesNSDL EduPak 1.0 is the first release of an all-in-one educational technology package through the networks of NSDL and Fedora Commons open source developer communities. The next release of NSDL EduPak will feature an NCore Digital Repository (NDR) based on Fedora open source repository software version 3.0 content model architecture and a bug tracking system to support community participation and feedback in improving the platform. We Want to Hear from You Please submit general feedback, bug reports and queries here: http://nsdl.org/about/contactus/ For additional information and training opportunities regarding the NCore Collection System (NCS) or Search please contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652. For more information about the NCore digital repository (DR) please contact Carol Minton Morris at 607-255-2702. A series of small, focused NSDL Technical Summits will begin in 2009 to engage open source education technology developers from NSDL communities and others in designing features and improvements for future releases of the NSDL EduPak digital library services platform for education. Training To encourage adoption of NSDL EduPak and other NCore Tools and Services, a web seminar training program has been established to help NSDL grantees, NSF grantees and others understand the tools that are available through NCore, how to contribute a collection to NSDL, and how to create a portal to a digital library with EduPak. Schedules for upcoming presentations and downloads of prior web seminars are available here: http://nsdl.org/pd/?pager=brownbag. For more information contact Karon Kelly at 303-497-2652. About NSDLIn 2000, the
National Science Foundation created the National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support
innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In addition to providing an
organized point of access to high-quality STEM content, NSDL also provides
open-access, non-proprietary tools to stimulate new ways to access and use
scientific information in an easily accessible online environment. NSDL EduPak is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0840744. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. |
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