Researchers from Cornell's National Science Digital Library (NSDL) group, including Carl Lagoze, Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Naomi Dushay, Dean Eckstrom and John Saylor, have won the Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at the 2006 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, held in Chapel Hill, N.C., for their paper on the successes and lessons learned during the creation and operation of the NSDL's central repository over the past three years.

The $1,000 award is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery.

The authors are part of a 15-member Cornell team that conducts research as part of the National Science Foundation's NSDL project, which aims to create a digital library of selected high-quality resources for education in science, mathematics and engineering. The Cornell team both develops the software infrastructure and operates the production library, which is available online at http://nsdl.org/.

Based on the experiences reported in the paper, the NSDL team at Cornell has developed and implemented a completely new architecture for the NSDL central repository that addresses many of the shortcomings of the first version. The new architecture will be in full production by late summer 2006.

The paper, "Metadata Aggregation and Automated Digital Libraries: A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience," concluded that while the initial NSDL architecture led to successful deployment of a production digital library, the human effort costs were inordinately high, and the potential benefits gained from structured metadata (data about the data) were compromised by lack of quality and incompleteness.