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To be successful the Earth system education (ESE) Digital Library must provide a wide range of services that support and actively promote the inherently multi-disciplinary aspects of Earth Systems Science (ESS). The library will support the following digital and human-mediated services:

• Collaboration and brokerage among ESS educators in their many roles as learners, researchers, and information creators
• Access to integrative tools such as models and visualizations
• Access appropriate data and information necessary for producing ESE material.
• Applications that serve the needs of consumers with special requirements (e.g., the Americans with Disabilities Act).

A Digital Library (DL) for Earth system education (ESE) is unique because of its integrated nature, cutting across a broad range of disciplines, users, and creators. Secondly, unlike other digital libraries, a DL focusing on ESE must incorporate data with large spatial, temporal, and disciplinary variability. In addition, the needs of the ESE community include assisting the instruction of subject matters beyond the disciplines in which instructors were trained. For these reasons, the services provided by the DL for ESE must go beyond those provided by traditional digital libraries to include services that foster multidisciplinary collaboration and integration.

The DL must provide service to two classes of clients, product consumers and product creators. By our definition product consumers are all those participants who come to the library to acquire information. Product creators are those participants that interact with the library by providing content, including digital objects. These digital objects will fall into one of two classes: scientific data and educational content. Although we anticipate participants being both consumers and creators of digital objects, it is useful to differentiate between the two in describing the necessary services.

We envision two classes of service: digital and human mediated. Digital services are those provided electronically by the DL (i.e., with minimal human interaction at time of delivery). Human mediated services require staff assistance.

We list below the services essential to the functioning of the DL. Of these essential services, there are those that we deem absolutely crucial to the functioning of even a rudimentary DL. Second, we consider it desirable to establish at least one service priority in each of the categories listed below. The primary rationale for this approach is to establish a working model across all of the service areas early in the development cycle. This is done so that the skeletal structure of the DL and its service functions can be tested and modified while critical implementation plans are still being made. In the list given below, services meeting either of these two criteria are italicized. Of the items listed as being of high priority, we recognize those related to developing querying and software support services as the highest.

The Digital Services the Library should provide to consumers include:

1. Querying Services – The DL must develop and maintain software that allows consumer access to DL contents. This service must be sufficiently flexible so that a broad range of consumers, with a variety of needs, have easy and intuitive access to DL resources. Objects stored in the DL should be searchable through a variety of tags, such as: subject area, geographical area, time (i.e., object creation date, data creation date, etc.), learning style, educational standards, data type, etc.
2. Software Services – The DL must insure the development and maintenance of software that allows users to visualize, integrate, model and simulate basic, earth science data sets (e.g., earthquake epicenters, mean temperature, ocean current patterns, etc.). In addition, the DL should develop and provide links to appropriate models and simulations operated and maintained by other creators.
3. Automatic Delivery Services - These include services that automatically or routinely distribute digital content to a list of subscribed users. Such services are currently available from commercial enterprises like PointCast and CarlUncover for delivery of real-time news and tables of content for journals, respectively. In this way, every time a new item is catalogued in the library, or if external resources are indexed or abstracted by the library, interested users will be notified automatically.
4. Clearinghouse Services – In addition the DL should provide clearinghouse services. Examples include: 1) access to peer-reviewed information, 2) distribution of news and temporally important data sets, 3) announcements for a variety of opportunities (e.g., employment, research, educational, etc.) for students and professionals, 4) coordination of student, synoptic data collection and course support, 5) coordination, distribution, and facilitation of student collected data, 6) publication of K-16 research, 6) access to earth science experts, 7) matching of students with mentor students, 8) promotion of DL products, 9) provision of a forum for teachers collaborative ESS projects, and 10) dissemination of ESS career exploration.
5. Technology Aided Collaborations – These include content-based electronic discussion forums, groupware services, virtual seminars, interactive virtual field trips, and desktop video conferencing.
6. User Feedback Services – The DL will develop mechanisms for consumers feedback on products and services in a field testing phase, and after product implementation. Information gathered should include user profiles and product usage statistics. This information will be stored as meta data associated with the product and be distributed to consumers, creators, educational researchers, and DL managers.

Human Mediated Services will include:

1. Help Desk Services – The DL will provide user assistance in finding resources, in DL software usage and in fulfilling specialized requests such as layering specialized data requests (e.g., layering agribusiness information on top of normalized vegetation index).
2. Professional Development Services – The DL should be proactive in support of educators involved in ESE. This could include the organization and presentation of virtual and real experiences (e.g., workshops, conferences, training, mentoring). The DL will provide teaching and learning examples: e.g., cooperative learning, alternative assessment, creating web sites, searching the web, use of rubrics, use of technology, use of electronic discussion groups, alternative teaching methods (inquiry-based, problem-based learning, direct teaching, etc), developing multiple intelligences, and electronic portfolios.
3. Brokered Collaborative Activities – The DL will lead in fostering relationships within the ESE community. These collaborations could be in the form of mentoring, consumer/supplier, and co-PI relationships. In addition, the brokered services should match specific learning needs with appropriate products, partnerships, and/or mentors. The library can also define theme sessions (in response to community requests), working groups to explore certain topics, and may even commission "white papers" on specific issues.
4. Maintenance and Sustainability – Guaranteeing the integrity and stability DL materials will provide one of its key distinctions from the current World Wide Web. Integrity includes accessibility, currency, correctness; stability includes operability, periodic upgrades, and monitoring of product usage. This is a fundamental and non-negotiable function of the library. Materials in the variety of raw and value-added databases, descriptive text; software; model code; lesson plans; pedagogical innovations, user reviews, and so forth are all subject to this necessary service. Expecting that materials will be distributed across the Internet, special strategies and considerations for maintenance and stability of DL holdings must be developed. A skeletal context for product maintenance and stability should be designed and invoked at the outset, and then evolved through actual development of the DL.
5. Quality Control and Assurance – The DL must establish a policy and procedure to insure high-quality, up to date, and reliable digital objects.

The library must support digital object creators. Support will include:

1. Gathering Services – While the DL must encourage volunteered contributions, it must actively identify community needs and then solicit contributions from the community to fill these needs. If solicitations fail, the DL should look into developing the materials internally or contracting with a creator. In addition, the DL must take the lead in negotiating consumer access to digital objects created by institutional creators (e.g., USGS, USDA, EPA, NASA).
2. Creator Services – The DL must identify open, technical standards (e.g., ISO9000) for data distribution, interface interaction, etc. Contributors to the DL will be encouraged to conform to these standards. Furthermore, the DL will broker lines of communication between product creators, consumers, and education specialists. Finally, the DL will assist product developers by supplying sample data sets, development standards, access to specialized expertise, relationships with educational specialists, and field-testing.

Additional services related to e-commerce, security, authentication, and licensing will be developed as needed.

1. Because of the diversity of consumers and creators, we recommend the establishment of a standing service committee that reports directly to the portal Steering Committee. The members of the service committee should be appointed by the Steering Committee for a three-year term, consisting of six to eight members representing users and developers from a diverse perspective representing the ESE community. The initial tasks for this committee will include:

1. Develop and conduct market surveys to prioritize the above services and identify other service needs not considered above.
2. Work with the steering committee to implement the critical services defined above.

1. Establish a centralized office for core DL services that will provide administrative services and coordinate the activities of the service committee.