With NASA in the news so much lately(1, 2, 3, 4), it seems a good reminder that the organization has nearly 70 Educator Resource Centers across the country.  These are fantastic resources to tap for information relevant to a wide range of learners.

From the NASA Educator Resource Center Network web site:

• NASA Educator Resource Centers provide services to those in the education community including teachers, scout leaders, public and private schools, homeschoolers, museums, planetariums, colleges and universities, and other education-related groups.

• It helps to be precise about your interests and requests, so have a topic and grade level in mind when you call. ERCs have limited amounts of materials available.

• NASA educational resources fall under categories such as Earth Science, Space Science, Living and Working in Space, Aeronautics, Aerospace, and topics related to Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Geography. Materials are designed to supplement K-University curriculum. Complete curriculum guides are not available from NASA.

I had the opportunity to visit the Educator Resource Center at the Kennedy Space Center a few years ago.  They were helpful, enthusiastic, informative, and had loads of reference material.  It reminded me of what a good library should strive for!

found via the NASA Do-It-Yourself Podcast blog

May All Your Standards Be Simple and Evolvable is a post by John Wilbanks on Science Blog’s Common Knowledge.  It is written with medical data standards in mind, but it could be discussing the state of library data as well:

“…TCP/IP, created simply to move bits between computers, begat a variety of new protocols like FTP, Gopher, Finger, many other protocols that layered atop the basic bits standard. Complexity from simplicity. Attempting to embed file transfer into the bits protocol would have made this whole process a lot harder.”

We are approaching a point in which we will be moving our data out of the cumbersome and outdated MARC format.  It will happen, regardless of the heel-dragging that has been taking place for over 10 years.  The debate is still heated over what we will replace the standard with.

Can we come up with something simple and evolvable?  I define this as being able to build things out of data without having to break the it up into usable chunks.  Have you looked at a MARC (.mrc) record with a text editor?  There is no easy way to determine what much of the data means, and the entire record is one string of information.  You can usually pick out the title, author and a few other things, but mostly it looks like gobbledygook.

If our data were in nice, small, understandable pieces to begin with, with straightforward rules guiding how it was formatted, it would invite innovation and creative use.  We are only hindering ourselves with the complexity and arcane rules; simplicity would serve everyone’s needs far better.