Adding Value to the NSDL by Integrating it into Academic Libraries: A Business Proposition and a Service Enhancement

University Of California, Office Of The President, Oakland, Oakland CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Targeted Research project is conducting market research that evaluates what content and services the NSDL needs to offer to attract and thus support itself at least in part with subscriptions paid by academic libraries. A second strand of activity is developing a prototype service that integrates NSDL into the foundational science collections managed by libraries. The prototype includes tools that enable libraries to create views of their integrated science collections customized to the needs of different patrons. Work on this aspect of the project is informing the modifications that the NSDL and its collection providers may need to make to their technical architectures to enable them to better support integration into academic library collections, thus enhancing NSDL's value in the library market. This project leverages the considerable digital library infrastructure and expertise that resides with the California Digital Library (CDL) and the ten University of California research libraries. Because these libraries operate highly diverse technical environments, service deployment and evaluation is taking place in a test bed setting representative of the heterogeneous technical environments that characterize academic libraries in general.