ComPADRE Project Meeting 2007
From ComPADRE Wiki
Monday, June 25 - Tuesday, June 26
Goals
- Share experiences, set priorities, discuss outreach and growth
- Develop Collection missions and policies
- Showcase technology, collaborations, NSDL efforts, etc.
- Discuss outreach, tutorials, and marketing
- Enjoy the company and Compadre-ship
Agenda - Monday, June 25
Breakfast at HGI
8:30 - Leave Hilton Garden Inn for ACP
9:00 - Gathering, Introductions, Goals
9:15 - Short Collection Reports
State of the Collection, Successes and Challenges, Collaborations and Partnerships, Goals for the Coming Year
Highlights of editor talk: The use of the collection was up markedly in 2007. Another primary accomplishment is the continued success of REU postings, which were up 25% from 2006. The collection leadership is now in discussions to add job listings for physics bachelors degree recipients. One of the main goals for the coming year is to increase discussion forum participation, which may include forum moderators. In terms of challenges, the editor will be finding ways to promote community participation.
Highlights of editor talk: The use of the collection was up markedly in May, 2007, possibly because students had assignments to complete using the PTG website. Ed Lee coordinated a mass email to public school science coordinators to promote the website, which may be a contributing factor to the increased numbers. The initiatives for 2007 include surveying the audience, identifying gold-star sites, set-up of Relations, creation of editorial board, and finding an associate editor.
Highlights of editor talk: Web seminars and workshops have been of the primary goals of The Physics Front for the 2007, as well as populating the topical Units for high school physics teachers. Other priorities are publicizing the collection and strengthening collaborations with PTRA, PTEC, and NSTA. The editor will also be actively recruiting associate editors for each of the topical areas. New initiatives include a PTRA mentoring network, blogs, and PTRA manual revision, and grade-level differentiation of organization of materials.
Highlights of editor talk: Newest addition to the collection is the Special Feature: Reviews in PER. This part includes review articles on 4 research-based curricula (ISLE, M&I, Peer Instruction, and SCALE-UP) written by the developers. Continuing to solicitate for bibliographies, curricula, theses, and research groups. Challenges include having more active participation by PER community on submitting and maintaining various aspects of the collection. Possible soluton may come from having the collection serve as the main communications hub for AAPT PER Topical Group. Suggestion made to have a list of past and current Ph.D.'s in PER added in Groups & People.
Highlights of talk: There are currently more than 550 items in the collection. The primary goal this year has been to move through the backlogged editor workflow. Challenges include finding high-quality resources appropriate to the audience and locating a collection editor. When this happens, the review process can move forward as well. The site traffic has stalled this year, which may be attributable to a need for marketing and outreach. Workshops are scheduled for the coming term in introductory astronomy, with the hope to expand this outreach with a permanent editor/associate editors.
Highlights of editor talk: One priority for 2007 has been to get a handle on who the PTEC audience is and how to organize the front page for maximum ease of navigation/usability. The site is not generating much traffic, and efforts are underway to strengthen collaborations with CTPL and other groups. Other priorities include improving community participation, supporting efforts to recruit and retain high-quality physical science teachers, and simplifying the submissions process.
Highlights of editor talk: Priorities in developing this new collection are organizing materials so that they can be quickly found, bookmarked, and available for future use. The PIRA vocabulary has been used to to differentiate resources for general audiences, education majors, science majors, and higher-level calculus-based courses. Near-term considerations include linking to other libraries such as Physlet, JiTT and PER. Implementing a peer review/user rating is anticipated for the coming year. Tentative timeline is to be online with Physics Source by late fall, 2007.
Highlights of editor talk: This new collection is in the initial development phase. The Advanced Labs community is a small, but rather well-connected group. Goals for the new collection will be to follow a modified wiki model to attract both visitors and registered users. Registered users will have access to archives and "sandbox", with capability of giving feedback and reviewing resources. The editor would like to see multiple submittal formats, with easy uploading of video. Topics and vocabularies are under discussion now. Tentative timeline is to have a prototype available by Fall, 2007.
Highlights of Editor Talk: The Quantum Exchange editor has focused on adding pedagogical materials to the collection, as well as related items. This collection will serve as a prototype for other future collections, such as Relativity and Stat Mech. The PSRC, which is the original AAPT online resource library, is a very large collection serving a broad variety of users. The challenges for the PSRC include finding ways to efficiently move through new resources and how to engage an audience of this breadth.
Nurturing and strengthening collaborations among our collections plus other pathways and collections within the NSDL is crucial for sustainability. Alternate sources of funding will be high on the priority list. It is critical that we offer easy access to our very best materials, thus encouraging repeat usage of the collections. It would be useful for editors to assess what has worked and what has not worked. To analyze this requires a knowledge of who our market is and how they want to use our collections. We need to have mechanisms to assure that other NSF-funded projects related to ours are included in our collections.
10:30 - Break
10:45 - Collection Development Document
Creating Development Policies - Goals & Examples, Homework
- Collection Development Policy Goals
- Break-out, Collection-specific discussions
11:45 - NSDL Central Library Updates
12:00 - Lunch
1:00 - ComPADRE Updates
Collaborations and New Collections
1:30 - Technical Updates
2:30 - Break
2:45 - Reaching Out, Getting Help
Break-out sessions on:
- Community Involvement/Promoting Collaboration
The two components that seem most important are identifying who the target audience is and how to motivate them to contribute or participate. In terms of building community, there has to be a reward for the participant, whether it is offering an outlet for authorship or a meaningful way to advance a cause. Suggestions that were explored include expanding communication and workshops for new faculty and high school teachers.
Much of the discussion centered on the use of student workers, both undergrad and graduate. Consensus was that content development should be done by grad students and associate editors, with undergrads performing the cataloging, cloning, and choosing tasks. Newly-submitted resources need to be available for editors to move through in a reasonable time. If the editors can identify and retain good associate editors, it would be helpful for the associates to have editorial permissions to lead the development of a focused topic. Currently, the workload is too great for one person to filter everything in a comprehensive collection. The group also wants to explore ways to get systematic training for their student workers in the cataloging, cloning, and choosing processes. There is a concern about how to best utilize ComPADRE's tools for communication among editors and student workers. Perhaps a tutorial could be developed as a project-wide "how-to". The group suggested that there be a streamlined way for editors to pull up submitted resources for their own collections. Would it be possible to develop a public wiki to put up submissions that might be of interest to users, but may not meet rigorous cataloging standards.
- Workshops and Workshop partners
Cathy and Ramon were the only two participants. After a fruitful (and short) discussion, they joined the group on associate editors/student workers.
4:00 - Advisory Groups
What is their role, who should be on them, how do we help them?
4:30 - Wrap-up, Tomorrow, Collection-specifics
TBA - Dinner
Tentative Agenda - Tuesday, June 26
8:30 - Leave HGI for ACP
9:00 - Homework Status
9:15 - Evaluation
PI comments: There are three strands to our evaluation efforts which include usability, measuring whether we are meeting the needs of the clientele we aim to serve, and the impact of ComPADRE on teaching and learning. To evaluate these things, we are using three instruments at the present time, which are detailed below.
- Web Metrics, Logs, and Omniture
- Usability, Workshop, and Web Surveys
- Impact Studies
- Break-out/Group discussion: What should the collections measure?
10:00 - Break
10:15 - Outreach and Marketing
Until now the Marketing efforts for ComPADRE have included:
- Presence at meetings (AAPT, AAS, NSTA, APS (through the AAPT))
- Workshops and presentations at meetings
- Announcements in AAPT publications and the online AAPT News
- Marketing materials including tri-fold flyer (old), bookmarks, postcards
Breakout Topics:
- Marketing materials
- Events/Workshops/Web Seminars
- Direct emails
- Collaborations with schools of education
- Workshops/web seminars
11:30 - Wrap-up and Goals
- Collection Development and Goals Statements
Bruce asks that editors submit collection development statements (the homework) within one week. The template is to be found above in Day 1 of the Project Meeting agenda.
- Timelines
- Needs of Editors
- Email blitz for volunteer editors
- ????
