In this project a consortium of organizations is building an information infrastructure on the foundation of the current Materials Science Digital Library collection (MatDL) and assuming stewardship of significant content and services to support the integration of education and research in materials science (MS). Additionally, this Pathways project is facilitating the dissemination of resources generated by government-funded MS collaborations. The MatDL partnership includes information/library scientists and materials scientists affiliated with government and research/teaching institutions: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Kent State University, MIT, University of Michigan, Iowa State University, and Purdue University. To multiply the impact of NSF-supported materials efforts, this network of collaborations is being extended to include several related NSF initiatives: Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams, Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers, and International Materials Institutes. The intellectual merit of this effort lies in its provision of tools to describe, manage, exchange, archive, and disseminate data among national and international government-funded materials teams and centers; support for open access development of modeling and simulation tools; development of services and content for virtual labs in large undergraduate introductory science courses; and the maintenance of a workspace for collaborative development of core undergraduate MS teaching materials as well as ontological tools for enhanced resource discovery. The project exercises broader impact by serving as a dedicated hub for the large materials research community, facilitating communication and interactions among its members. MatDL offers the opportunity to create learning objects based on recent research, as well as convenient access to relevant, shared resources and learning objects. Because of its inherent interdisciplinary nature MatDL also has an impact on a large constellation of STEM disciplines. The Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) is providing significant co-funding of this project in recognition of important role played by materials science education and research within the larger MPS portfolio of awards.
National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is the National Science Foundation's online library of resources and collections for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. As part of NSDL, the Materials Digital Library Pathway (MatDL), a collaboration involving Kent State University, University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Iowa State University, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has successfully developed an information infrastructure supporting materials education, research, and interactions between the two. MatDL’s target audience includes materials undergraduate and graduate students, educators, and researchers. These groups benefit from having access to MatDL’s tools and services which include: MatDL Repository MatForge Virtual Labs MatDL Wiki MatDL Repository The MatDL Repository offers a wide range of authoritative research and teaching resources including scientific images, classroom exercises, research preprints, and interactive learning applets related to materials science and engineering. MatDL provides tools to describe, archive, and disseminate the research and teaching resources contributed by national and international government-funded materials teams and centers. MatForge Recognizing that computational tools will be an integral part of the work environment of tomorrow’s materials scientists and engineers, MatForge has been developed as a branded, trusted, non-commercial, and neutral workspace to support collaborative development of open source materials modeling and simulation computational codes. Team members have conducted outreach at professional society meetings to bring Matforge educational resources and services to the attention of educators interested in helping undergraduates develop necessary skills in computational materials. MatForge has also contributed its tools and content to the University of Michigan’s Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering Summer School Program held in 2011 and in 2012. Virtual Labs Virtual Lab (VL) lessons and applets have been designed, assessed, and disseminated online for use in large introductory science courses to reinforce understanding of the key scientific concepts such as states, energy, degeneracy, entropy, and free energy. The VLs have been tested by undergraduates at institutions including Carnegie Mellon University, Kent State University, MIT, and the University of Wisconsin. Consistently, students reported the VLs to be a positive learning experience that helped them gain a deeper understanding of both familiar and unfamilar principles. In 2012, particulate level simulations were added to the collection. These include VLs simulating inelastic collisions, evaporative cooling, Brownian motion, chemical bonding, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and collision, osmosis and gas partial pressures, and populations of energy states. MatDL Wiki The MatDL Wiki is a publicly accessible, expert-community-driven site for scientific communication and dissemination with emphasis on soft matter. By offering a variety of resources related to soft matter, such as terminology, definitions, relationships, multimedia examples, and links to scholarly articles, the Wiki provides an introduction to this rapidly evolving field for undergraduate students and new graduate research assistants, as well as a dissemination point for expert researchers.
