Past Projects

2002 to 2004

The National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) had (and has) the potential to enrich the interest and understanding of learners of all ages as they pursue education or careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). However, very little of this enriched and supported STEM content was meaningful to learners, parents, teachers, researchers, or trainers with disabilities. To address this problem, Access NSDL made a concerted effort to infuse access considerations into the priorities, practices, and policies of the NSDL community.

The Access NSDL project built the capacity of the NSDL to meet the needs of users with disabilities. Project staff provided the NSDL community with recommendations, tools, and resources to guide the development of a universally designed infrastructure and accessible services and content. The project design leveraged relevant work by CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) and the Internet Scout Research Group, and utilized resources available at the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The Access NSDL project furthered the National Science Foundation's goal to facilitate the inclusion of people with disabilities in STEM education and careers. The project's results still serve the nation's estimated 22 million deaf or hard-of-hearing people, 12 million blind or visually impaired people, and 8 million people with motor impairments, by making it possible for them to access the valuable science, math, engineering, and technical content in the NSDL.
2001 to 2003

LearningLanguages.net brought together the best online foreign language resources for English-speaking K-12 students and teachers. The project was created, maintained, and enhanced by a team of staff and students at the Internet Scout Research Group in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Letters and Science and with support from the Claire Giannini Hoffman Fund.

LearningLanguages.net was built using the Scout Portal Toolkit. The underlying portal installation was customized to add features specific to foreign language acquisition, and populated with information about online foreign language education resources. The project focused on three languages: Spanish, French, and Japanese. Content experts scoured the web every week for the best resources, and then described and cataloged them in order to make them accessible through the portal.
2000 to 2002

The Scout Portal Toolkit was a precursor to CWIS designed to allow groups to share assembled bodies of knowledge with the world via the Internet. The project was a near-turnkey software package that required minimal technical expertise to implement, but provided powerful tools for organizing and sharing information. The latest version of the Portal Toolkit featured cross-field searching, resource annotation by users, resource quality ratings by users, and a recommender system that allowed the portal to recommend resources based on a user's ratings and preferences. It also included an intelligent metadata tool to aid collection developers in building and maintaining resource metadata.

Although the Scout Portal Toolkit is no longer being developed, CWIS offers all of the Portal's features and more.
1996 to 2000

The Scout Report Signpost was a research project developed by the Internet Scout Project from 1996 to 2000 with funding from the National Science Foundation. The primary goal of the Scout Report Signpost was to demonstrate that Internet resources could be cataloged, classified, and arranged using existing controlled vocabularies and taxonomies such as the Library of Congress Classification Scheme and the Library of Congress Subject Headings in concert with the Dublin Core metadata standard. The Scout Report Signpost database contained exemplary Internet resources, as chosen by the editorial staff of the Scout Report. Signpost was designed to guide U.S. higher education to quality electronic resources. The majority of resources reviewed are free and freely accessible.

Signpost was supplanted and its mission continued by the Scout Report Archives.
1999 to 2002

The IMesh Toolkit Project was a joint effort by groups funded by JISC and the NSF to develop the IMesh Toolkit. The toolkit comprised tools and standards to support the creation and maintenance of subject specific gateways or, as we refer to them now, digital or online collections. The major participants in this effort included the UK Office for Library and Information Networking at the University of Bath in the UK, the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol in the UK, and Internet Scout at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States.
Isaac Network

1995 to 1997

In the late 1990s, locating information on the World Wide Web was decidedly difficult. The problem spawned a number of small, standalone collections of metadata describing high-quality Internet resources. The Isaac Network provided access to these geographically distributed metadata collections through a single searchable collection. It used standard Internet protocols to make the metadata records available, process user queries, and transfer index information between servers. The goal of the network was to bring together high-quality collections of human-cataloged Internet resources to provide a resource discovery system that allowed searchers to query the information by field, such as title, subject, author, or description. It used the Dublin Core as its standard metadata description format.
Net-Happenings

1995 to 2000

Founded in 1989, Net-Happenings is one of the longest running education mailing lists around, distributing announcements about education-related internet resources to its many subscribers. From 1995 to 2000, Net-Happenings was published by Internet Scout. If you are interested in visiting the current Net-Happenings site, you can find it at http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/NetHappenings.html.