UCARConnect uses the term collection to designate a group of digital resources that have something in common---a shared topic, intended audience, genre, resource type (e.g., demonstrations, videos), the institution that has sponsored their creation or review, or another shared characteristic. Each resource in a collection has its own URL and has been, or can be, individually catalogued. Examples of collections include the COMET Program Collection and the DragonflyTV collection. If you are interested in creating a collection for inclusion in UCARConnect, see Collection Development Strategies.

Contributing an existing collection to UCARConnect involves working with us to enable users to discover and get to individual resources in the overall library collection via a search across all the multiple collections that comprise the catalog or resources.

Achieving this goal takes time and effort---the collection you are building must have the capacity to provide us with UCARConnect-compatible descriptive information (or metadata) about each of its resources.

The tasks involved in contributing a collection to UCARConnect are outlined below. They may be accomplished in various orders or in parallel.

Ask yourself what type of collection you would like to contribute (resource, annotation or usage data)

Are you providing resources for teaching and learning? This is a resource collection. Are you providing resources that include teaching tips, comments from teachers or other users, educational standards, star ratings? This is an annotation collection. Are you providing resources that indicate how many times a resource was downloaded or favorited? This is a usage data (paradata) collection.

Ask yourself whether your collection is appropriate for UCARConnect

Do resources in your collection (or at least a significant portion of them) support teaching, learning, or educational research in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) topics, or in use of digital learning objects? Are they scientifically sound, technologically reliable, and easy to use? (See the UCARConnect Collection Policy and the UCARConnect Resource Quality checklist, and other UCARConnect quality rubrics). Do the annotation and usage data you provided apply to resources already existing within the NSDL? If you believe so, please contact us to initiate a discussion about next steps.

Consider the descriptive information (metadata) you have about individual resources (items) in your collection, or your capacity to create such metadata

See the Metadata information page as well as the pages on each metadata format type to learn more about what sorts of metadata UCARConnect collections provide.

  • Other metadata formats can be submitted to UCARConnect. However, NSDL needs to work closely with metadata providers when their metadata format is unknown to UCARConnect (this is because some UCARConnect services require the NSDL_DC format). 
  • Collection builders may use other metadata formats that are known to UCARConnect and are supported in some cataloging tools. The list of known metadata formats includes MSP2. 
  • If you need to create metadata, there are cataloging tools available, including the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS) and the UCARConnect Collection System (NCS). To learn more about either of these tools or to discuss providing a new metadata format to UCARConnect, please contact us.

Provide UCARConnect with metadata about your resources

Contributing a collection to UCARConnect means making your item-level metadata accessible to the UCARConnect systems and users. Collection builders can share metadata with NSDL by: 1) using an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) server; 2) programmatic means, via an application programming interface (API); 3) by using a cataloging tool that talks directly to NSDL. See Sharing Metadata with NSDL for more help in understanding these distinctions. 

Register your collection with UCARConnect

Do this by contacting us. You will need to provide general overall information about your collection, as well as contact information.

This is a small digital image, 100 pixels wide by 30 pixels tall or in that ratio, that we will use in displaying items from your collection when they appear in UCARConnect search results. Please see our Collection Branding Guidelines for file format and other specifications.

Obtain UCARConnect management approval

Per the Collection Policy, all collections are required to be approved before being accessioned into UCARConnect. This check ensures resource and metadata appropriateness. The NSDL collection development team works with collection builders to walk you through the steps to gain this approval.

Maintain the collection.

After a collection has been contributed to UCARConnect, it is our expectation that it will be kept up to date, with nonworking resource URLs weeded out and/or replaced, and metadata titles and descriptions corrected as needed, on an ongoing basis. 

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