Establishing High Quality Digital Collections of LTER Educational Resources

An LTER Educational Digital Library (LEDL) is an unprecedented, high-quality collection of educational learning resources centrally located on the LTER Education website. It includes instructional materials, educational data sets, multimedia, and visualizations serving middle, high school and undergraduate classrooms and educational professionals. Its underlying purpose is to support the teaching and learning of ecological science with an emphasis on making an LTER collection of resources accessible to a wider audience. This library would also offer existing projects like the LTER EcoTrends project , the Math Science Partnership, project (MSP) or EcoPlexity an opportunity to contribute and submit learning resources, that are currently being developed, to this LTER collection. Over time outside projects that have digital libraries (ESA, NSDL, CLEAN, FDL) could potentially harvest our LTER metadata and broaden the dissemination of our materials. The benefits of building an LTER Digital Library collection include: Exposure: increases accessibility to LTER educational resources. Discovery: acts as a centralized location to discover applicable LTER educational resources. Collaboration: provides avenues to collaborate among and between LTER sites, outside facilities and other related LTER educational projects (i.e MSP, EcoTrends, Desert Jam, EcoPlexity). Service: offers support in the management of educational resources by LTER Education members. Recognition: promotes LTER sites by drawing the public to their site. Professional Development: elevates LTER Education & Outreach coordinators professionally and brings outside educational professionals to us.