Let me continue the thinking out loud about the NSF thing, in the interest
of getting it a bit clearer myself.  

The RFP is at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03530/nsf03530.htm and I'm not
suggesting that you read it or anything like that, but it conjures with
phrases like "rich, learner-centered educational materials and environments"
(5), "services to increase the impact, reach, efficiency, and value of the
digital library in its fully operational form" (7), "mechanisms to exploit
collaborative leraning environments... to help content developers combine
resources by different authors and from different collecetions... to
associate commentary and other annotations with resources... " (8) "Does the
project fill a definable content or service gap for NSDL? Is the target
audience clearly defined, and what is the potential for the project to make
a significant impact on that audience? Is there the potential for the
project to model a particularly creative approach to the provision of
digital library services or to the development of a usable collectionof
resources? Does the project offer access to new content areas not previously
vailable through NSDl? Or is the project enabling a new user audience to
access NSDL? Can this serve as a model for other user audiences?" (13)

OK. So what I'm looking at is the INTERSECTION of (1) Environmental Studies,
(2) GIS, and (3) digital [i.e., distributed and multimedia] libraries. A
quintessentially interdisciplinary Boolean product, an area with a LOT
beginning to happen, an area of direct concern to most of the institutions
in NITLE, since many have ES programs of one sort or another  (and if
anybody in US liberal education is going to be innovative in this area, it's
pretty likely to be NITLE schools), and a crystal-clear case of a realm
where data, data visualization, spatial information are rife and rank, and
problematic in the extreme. Everybody has data, gathers data, uses data
(that's sort of the essence of Environmental Studies). The various schools
work mostly with their backs to one another, and often enough don't know
what's going on outside their own departments at their own campuses, let
alone at others. They NEED the means to collaborate, cooperate, share
resources --all of these in the context of the undergraduate teaching and
research upon which they pride themselves. 

So this scheme proposes to build the STRUCTURE (significantly, NOT the
content) for a digital library into which LOCAL resources can be put, from
which remote resources can be drawn, and within which collaborative
activities can be carried forward... what a good idea. The resources
themselves (data sets, imagery, GIS layers, texts) may reside on local
servers: the digital library is a collection of metadata pointers, most of
them georeferenced (so they can be retrieved via a map interface, as one of
the methods), and presumably some of them with kinds of access control
(thus, JSTOR articles would be available to any campus with IP
authentication to JSTOR; some datasets might be available to a set of
collaborators at 4 campuses but not to others except by arrangement, some
materials would be available only to NITLE, etc.)... and the whole structure
would be accessible to metadata harvesters of NSDL, so that a search on the
NSDL site would find materials in the collections contributed by NITLE
members...

This goes far beyond the silly and limited idea that a digital library is
just digitized text (reformatting a conventional library), and builds an
environment that becomes supportive of undergraduate teaching and learning
as people contribute to it --and they'd be contributing materials that might
otherwise be unavailable, as in the case of DSpace.

What I need to find is a couple of other PIs, one an Environmental Studies
person (and Hank Art at Williams is the first person I'll broach this to,
but there may be some obvious others that you know of) and another a
database-building person (the outlines of how to actually do this are fairly
clear, scaling up the prototypes Skip and I have been messing with), and
leveraging the Alsos project (alsos.wlu.edu) that Betsy is a co-PI on --but
it might be that somebody you know would have suggestions for people who
might be approached, somebody interested in big NSF money...

Our NSF person here (Frank Settle, Alsos director and also one of our grants
people) likes the outlines of the scheme, and says they seem to fit NSDL's
priorities and interests. He says it sounds to him like a $600,000-scale
project. Now wouldn't NITLE like to be associated with such a thing? And
couldn't it fit with the GIS initiative, and perhaps with other fragments as
well? The main problem is the short time frame (proposal due April 21) to
get people lined up. I do have a dynamite proposal-writing team in my very
own home...

...just thinking out loud, and slowly working toward a two-page summary of
essentials. Any thoughts would be most welcome.