Contribute a Resource or Collection

NSDL encourages developers of STEM content, NSF grant awardees, STEM educators and learners, and all other NSDL users and community members to help us enlarge and strengthen the Library. We welcome recommendations concerning digital resources NSDL users have created or discovered on the web, such as activities, lesson plans, web sites, or simulations. We are also eager to hear from organizations or individuals who have created or are interested in creating collections of STEM resources. In NSDL terms, a collection is an assemblage of related digital resources -- usually brought together around a topic or theme, type of resource, audience, or institution -- each with its own URL, and each catalogued by the collection builder or manager.

Benefits of contributing materials to NSDL include:

There are two methods for contributing materials to NSDL, described below. Which you should use depends on the number of resources you wish to contribute and whether they constitute a collection.

1. Contributing one or several individual resources

This is quick and easy to do. The steps are as follows:

You will be notified if the resource you are recommending is accepted for inclusion in the Library. If it is accepted, the descriptive information you have provided via the Recommend a Resource form will be reviewed and edited. It will become part of NSDL’s catalog record for the resource, which will be viewable by Library users. NSDL may create an archived copy of the resource. (For details of these policies see the NSDL Collection Development Policy, particularly the “Terms of Participation” section.)

2. Contributing a collection

As mentioned above, NSDL uses the term collection to designate a group of digital resources that have something in common -- a shared topic, intended audience, genre or type (e.g., demonstrations, videos, e-prints), the institution that has sponsored their creation or review, or another shared characteristic. Each resource in a collection has its own URL and has been, or can be, individually catalogued. Examples of collections include the Analytical Sciences Digital Library, arXive.org, and the Bridge-NOAA Educational Resources Collection. If you are interested in creating a collection for inclusion in NSDL, see the Collection Development Blueprint.

Contributing an existing collection to NSDL involves working with us to enable NSDL users to discover and access individual resources in the collection through a search across the multiple collections that comprise NSDL. Achieving this goal requires some measure of time and effort; the collection must have the capacity to provide us with NSDL-compatible descriptive information (or metadata) about each of its resources.

The tasks involved in contributing a collection to NSDL are outlined below. These tasks may be accomplished in various orders or in parallel.