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

I am a bit of a space freak (several people will read this and say “A bit???”), so this touches on two of my interests.

NASA’s Inclusion and Innovations Council recently had a all-day report period on barriers to inclusion and innovation at the agency.  Changing the institutional behaviors that stifle people’s incentive to provide ideas and input has been a priority at the agency since the loss of Columbia.

One of the reports was not presented as a printed report or a displayed set of slides.  It was a video posted on YouTube, and charted the process in which a NASA employee attempts to contribute an innovative idea to a project.

Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion.

Next, read Wayne Hale’s blog entry about this video.  Recognize that this is a person who has worked in an organization where this type of behavior not only stifles innovation, it can cost lives.  Yet the behavior exists in many places, including many libraries.

Does this seem familiar?  Have you known someone who had an idea, perhaps outside of his or her job description, who was “handled” in this sort of way?  Have you been this person?  Have you been this person’s supervisor, or someone who was approached with an idea?  Did you discuss chains of command, or supervisors, or that it had been done some other way for years?

This is not an issue just for NASA; this is an issue for any organization that risks demoralizing employees and locking themselves into bureaucratic irrelevance.  This might be your library.  Watch the video, and then watch yourselves and others to ensure that you are not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

One part of the solution is to generate ideas, good ideas about anything and everything you observe.  Express them to anyone who can use them; express them in a constructive, positive way, and give people every reason to consider them for adoption.

Another part is to watch for ideas from others.  Encourage them to brainstorm and to express their suggestions.  Be supportive, offer constructive advice, and be that echoing voice during staff meetings or at the break room table saying “That sounds like it has potential!”

Yet another part is to watch yourself, ensuring that when someone makes a suggestion or presents an idea, that it is the suggestion or idea that is discussed, not the bureaucratic structure or the current procedures that dominates your response.

Think about how much better your library, as well as everyone else’s library, can be, if we only encourage innovation and inclusion.  Think about it.

found via Librarian in Black

Google’s Moon Shot is the title of an article in the current New Yorker magazine.  The title refers to a quote that likens the Google Book Project to Nasa’s Project Apollo.

Quite a bit of interest in this article, including the estimated number of books in WorldCat:  32,000,000 (note that the WorldCat site indicates “over 1 billion items”.

posted on Web4Lib

NASA recently made 1100 Apollo-era documents, including Mission Reports (I have read several, and they are truly fascinating to those interested in manned spaceflight), Evaluation Reports, Scientific Studies, and Interviews, available on a DVD-ROM, calling it the Lunar e-Library. Fantastic! All are government documents, and putting them all together like this is a boon for researchers, enthusiasts, historians, librarians, and such.

However, they contracted for software that limits distribution of the software itself to employees of NASA. That’s it. Game over.  Nobody else can use this wonderful DVD. There are several good options in the open source software world for this project, and the only restriction would be that the software license would need to remain open. No big deal.

Why keep all this wonderful information closed off? This would have been one of the great DVD-ROM offerings, except it cannot be offered to the public because of a restrictive software license, and for no good reason. Arrrghh!

from Catalogablog

…it didn’t, and won’t, appear so from the Earth (unless something goes very, very wrong)!

Nasa ; UniverseToday ; Bad Astronomy