NSDL EduPak 1.0: An Open Source Digital Library Services Platform for Education
National educational organizations and institutions focused on establishing specialized digital collections, conducting educational research, or providing students, teachers and instructors with discipline-oriented pedagogical products and tools require basic technology to build educational digital repositories that support their work. To help meet a national priority expressed by the National Science Board (NSB) in January 11, 2009 recommendations to the Obama Administration in which they stated, "Our national economic prosperity and security require that we remain a world leader in science and technology," the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is pleased to announce the premiere release of NSDL EduPak 1.0. Specifically designed for education, EduPak packages technology for digital storage, access and workflow into a convenient bundle designed to to jump start the essential "behind-the-scenes" framework that enables innovation in teaching and learning. NSDL EduPak may be downloaded through NSDL at NCore and through Fedora Commons.
NSDL EduPak is a publicly available, lightweight version of NCore, established in 2008 as an open-source digital library platform of technology and standards that create a dynamic information layer on top of library resources. Based on Fedora open source repository software, NCore provides users, developers, information managers and decision-makers with systems for description, organization, interrelation and annotation of resources. Built using NCore components, EduPak is an all-in-one, open source, education digital repository solution bundle that provides a general platform for building digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications.