Contribution and collaboration strategies for the National Science Digital Library (nsdl.org): investigating technological solutions to facilitate social evolution of a collaborative infrastructure

The NSDL community consists of large, discipline diverse, and decentralized user groups made up of collaborator communities who create, aggregate, and contribute digital resources to the NSDL. NSDL Core Integration provides "wholesale" services to NSDL collaborator communities who may "retail" those services through their own portals, perhaps packaged with additional content selected to meet their specialized users' needs. NSDL "wholesale" services will support rich representations of complex data relationships. NSDL will distribute access to aggregations and annotations stored in the NSDL metadata repository that have been harvested, normalized (based on the scaleable library production model in use at nsdl.org), and exposed for re-harvest. "Retailers" may use the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) for Metadata Harvesting Protocol to harvest these structured data relationships and make them available for use in other library services.