Building Collections for the Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE)
Bryan Aivazian, Ed Geary, and Chris DiLeonardo

There are various perspectives in the collection building process for DLESE. At one end of the scale there is the NSDL funded project to develop the DLESE broad and deep collection. The goal of this project is to continually assess the DLESE collection building process to ensure that the library is balanced in its holdings (has something for everyone).

On the other end of the spectrum are projects that seek to identify resources related to a specific topic or theme. This perspective is represented by the Digital Water Education Library project (DWEL), the first major collection building effort to systematically bring K-12 resources into DLESE. Efforts are currently underway to provide teachers, students and informal educators with access to over 500 exemplary digital resources related to the science, policy and economics of water by the end of 2003. The DLESE 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.

Developing a collection for DLESE is a process that takes many steps and one that presents many challenges. Although the project is still in its early stages, there are a lot of lessons learned that will be shared. Topics to be addressed include the following:

· Developing a collection scope document (what goes into the collection)
· Conducting regular collection assessment (analyzing the library for gaps)
· The need for creating user scenarios (how will the collection be used)
· Managing and directing volunteer efforts that are spread out over a wide geographic area
· The importance of Quality Assurance in cataloging (maintaining high standards)
· Evaluation as both a formative and summative tool

Special collections will certainly be a big part of the growing DLESE library. Growing a well-balanced collection is one of the prime objectives of DLESE. This session is designed to share experiences from various collection building projects to provide guidance for future collection building efforts.