MatDL.org: The Materials Digital Library and the National Science Digital Library Program

Abstract

AbstractThe National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Program is a premier collective portal of authoritative scientific resources supporting education and research. With funding from NSF, the Materials Digital Library (MatDL) is a collaborative project being developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory (NIST/MSEL), the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan (U-M), with Kent State University and University of Colorado at Boulder providing the materials science informatics and workflow technology backbone. As part of the NSDL program, MatDL aims to supports the interface of materials science information and its cognate disciplines, with an emphasis on soft matter. Initial content of MatDL begins with resources selected from NIST/MSEL. Students and faculty in three types of materials science and engineering (MSE) courses at MIT and U-M are taking part in a pilot to use and contribute to MatDL utilizing domain-specific authoring tools. Given the central and interdisciplinary role of materials science in science and engineering, two goals of MatDL are to: 1.) expand its founding partnership with additional participants from the MSE community; and 2.) facilitate the flow of digital materials related knowledge from laboratories where the most recent research discoveries are taking place to the classrooms where new scientists are being trained.