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Institute Projects

This Institute has a quarter century history of high-quality research, services and products. This page lists our current and recent research steams and associted projects.

Education Information

The Institute has over a quarter century in delivering education information to teachers, researchers and policy makers. Current education information projects include the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM), the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Educator's Reference Desk.

Related Projects

The Gateway to Educational Materials

GEM began in September 1996 to improve access to valuable classroom and learning materials. GEM is a consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of educational materials found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://www.thegateway.org

The National Science Digital Library

The NSDL (National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library) is a program designed to establish a national digital library that will constitute an online network of learning environments and resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education at all levels.
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://www.nsdl.org

Digital Libraries

Digital libraries are coherent collections of digital information distributed over several systems for a given audience. The Institute has great expertise in building digital libraries and tools for digital library builders. We bring a wealth of software skills, research, and library tradition to the task. The Institute can offer a wide array of tools for education portals, digital libraries, and large websites seeking to better disseminate information.

Associated Links

The Educator's Reference Desk

The Educator's Reference Desk is a personalized Internet-based education service that includes 2000+ lesson plans, a question archive, the ERIC database, and a collection of over 3000 educational resources.
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://www.eduref.org

The NSDL SUN Project

SUN (Students Using NSDL) is an NSF/NSDL-funded research project that supports the creation of entry-points to NSDL that can be used by students to learn science information literacy and to engage in using NSDL resources. These access points will be NSDL-based interactivities designed to teach science information literacy to young students and introduce them to the NSDL Collections and Services.
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://nsdlsun.org/

Digital Reference

Digital reference is the use of the Internet to provide human intermediation on the web. Called virtual reference, digital reference, or AskA, digital reference puts the human face in the digital library.

OpenQA

OpenQA is software that combines digital reference with blogging.

Reference Extract and DREW

Reference Extract and DREW are exploring "reference authoring," or making new products and services out of digital reference artifacts (archives, transcripts, etc.).
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://digref.org

Digital Reference Education Initiative

The Digital Reference Education Initiative (DREI) seeks to bring together the collective expertise of practitioners, library educators, and digital reference software developers interested in issues of education and training in order to develop core competencies, and educational approaches to digital reference. DREI's main goal is to create an adaptable collection of core competencies, standards, tools, and training materials that may be used in various library and other information industry settings.
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://drei.syr.edu

The Virtual Reference Desk

The Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) is a project dedicated to the advancement of digital reference and the successful creation and operation of human-mediated, Internet-based information services. Current activities include the Virtual Reference Desk Conference.
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://www.vrd.org

Other Projects

The Institute is involved in a number of information, library and education projects.

The Future of Librarians in the Workforce

This is a two-year study sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Science (IMLS) that will identify the nature of anticipated labor shortages in the library and information science (LIS) field over the next decade; assess the number and types of library and information science jobs that will become available in the U.S. either through retirement or new job creation; determine the skills that will be required to fill such vacancies; and recommend effective approaches to recruiting and retaining workers to fill them. The study will result in better tools for workforce planning and management, better match of demand and supply, and improved recruitment and retention of librarians. The study is led by Dr. José-Marie Griffiths, Dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and includes researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, Syracuse University, the Special Libraries Association (SLA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T).
img/wiki_up//OmniWeb.pngSee Project website http://libraryworkforce.org/


Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation

The rise of new web applications that both facilitate and depend upon user contributions has exposed a number of serious issues that today's libraries must face. These web services allow users to easily:
  • build digital collections (YouTube, FLIKR);
  • join and create social networks (or digital collections of people such as MySPACE, Facebook); and
  • self publish (Blogger, LiveJournal).
The advance of these tools have had impacts in multiple areas. One clear example is on software developers (and consumers). Software developers now release early betas of software to a community for testing and refinement...sometimes creating permanent betas that never get officially "finished." Software developers also often look to a loosely coupled cadre of programmers to create and/or maintain software and standards through open source. These shifts in the Internet software community have already begun to impact libraries. User expectations for the online catalog and the services of a library they can access online have changed, and libraries must keep up.

The American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy has contracted the Information Institute of Syracuse to research and write a detailed technology brief on the topic of participatory networks. The brief will put an emphasis on interactive and social web applications such as blogs, social networks, and include a survey of the general "Web 2.0" and "Library 2.0" development world. The idea is to present a comprehensive document library decision makers can use to understand the new wave of social Internet applications, and devise strategies to respond to potential opportunities and threats. The draft of the document will be shared with ALA as well as experts in the field for initial comments in September and October. A public forum will be incorporated into a final drat document at the 2006 LITA Forum in Nashville.
See Project website http://libraryworkforce.org/