The Digital Water Library Project (DWEL): a NSDL K-12 collection

DWEL is the first major collection building effort to bring high quality, K-12 resources into the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE). Efforts are currently underway to provide teachers, students and informal educators with easy, searchable access to over 500 exemplary digital resources related to the science, policy and economics of water by the end of 2003. A discovery tool will allow users to search the library catalogue by content area, grade level, resource type and the national science standards to obtain the resources they desire. The selection of these exemplary resources, which best support teaching along core science concepts, is being conducted by experienced, practicing K-12 teachers who best know the needs of their peers and their students. There are millions of digital science and education resources on the Internet. A few of these resources are excellent, many more are at best average, and some are simply terrible. For K-12 educators, students, and parents with little time and diverse needs, finding the high quality resources they need, when they need them is often a difficult and daunting task. As National SMETE Digital Library (NSDL) efforts evolve, there is an urgent need to build a prototype collection of digital resources that complement existing collection efforts, but focus specifically on the needs of K-12 users.