Math Gateway Partners Meeting

Thursday, April 28 - Saturday April 30, 2005

Report from the Partner Breakout Session

Discussion of Conditions for Accepting New Partners
The following conditions were discussed:

1. The site has a significant amount of content
2. The site is stable. It is not likely to be down for long periods of time, nor be moved somewhere else.
3. The site has established, public review criteria
4. The site has a reasonable navigation system
5. There is an individual or small group of individuals who are responsible for the site and will respond to questions or requests.
6. The prospective partners have or will create appropriate metadata. In particular, they will work toward implementing the Core Taxonomy
7. The prospective partners are willing to participate in Gateway activities.

Bill Arms pointed out that the condition of requiring metadata for new partners may not be necessary since the automatic metadata generation programs are now working well.

Other measures of the significance of the site (rather than amount of content) may be appropriate, level of traffic, for example.

We will need open access to metadata.

We need to resolve some of the IP issues before publishing conditions.

Identifying and Recruiting New Partners
Some collections may not satisfy all the conditions, but might be encouraged to do so - and this would be valuable.

What about MIT open courseware? There may be intellectual property problems.

We could approach NASA about including their materials.

Perhaps, we should focus on applied mathematics.

We may already know all the significant completed collections in math that we would want to approach. Still we need to check.

Maybe we should approach the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences about supporting/extending Math Gateway.

We could approach other disciplinary societies about reciprocity agreements. We could create math-based metadata for a physics collection, and vice versa. This would be particularly attractive if we could use one of the automatic metadata creating tools for this work.

Assuming that new disciplinary pathway projects are funded in the current round, we should approach them about such agreements.

Resources for Partners / Prospective Partners
We should look into obtaining an appropriate metadata tool for partner use. Perhaps we could use the one developed by ENC.

We may be able to provide consulting services for new collections together with other pathways projects and the larger NSDL.

We need to develop criteria for bringing whole collections onto the MAA servers for preservation. These will include some measures of size and importance.

Other
We agreed that Math Gateway should not make any special effort for Ask NSDL since Math Forum's Ask Dr. Math is already providing that service in mathematics.