Full Circle to smete.org

As you know, we are going through a significant deaccessioning of items from the collection in order to make it more manageable and focussed on STEM education.

–NSDL Representative (name withheld)

I spent a lot of my time helping to create educational digital libraries of educational resources in Science, Technology, Engineering and Technology (STEM, above). In 1998-2001 we put quite a bit of work into smete.org and the SMETE Open Federation

We worked reasonably diligently to do a number of things:

• Locate relevant resources
• Identify like-minded collaborators doing complementary work–whether it be collections of resources in a wide range of disciplines, communities of users of varying educational levels
• Create multiple pathways for participation
• Aspire to production-level services, and distributed technologies
• Prioritize the social aspects, especially community, as much as the technical aspects

Most of our activities began winding down in 2001–and effectively ended by 2004. Beginning in 2001, the group tasked with building the NSDL ramped up its activities. Fast forward to 2009 and the quote above. By the time they complete the deaccessioning (read removal) of the (mostly) research resources in NSDL, coupled with the community structures and the notion of Pathways to content and communities, NSDL will mostly become smete.org and the SMETE Open Federation of 2001. /sigh