Exploratorium--Digital Library

The Exploratorium, in San Francisco, has a digital library that includes exhibits in a variety of formats, all of which are related to science. There is a science database of resources for K-12 that is also included in the NSDL. The Exploratorium site also includes subsections, such as one that contains images from a microscope imaging station with feature stories and accompanying video and printable pdfs. There is no available metadata on these images and they seem clearly targeted at educational use by teachers for their students, not serious researchers. There are other neat feature accessible under the "Explore" tab, like The Science of Cooking, which covers a variety of related topics in a variety of formats such as images, recipes, Web casts, and discussion boards.

The main collection is in the "Asset Archive," which to me at least is not a very user-friendly term. Entering the archive drops the user to a main page where items appear across the screen, with no information, and the navigation bar on the left offers what appear to be search terms that nonetheless do nothing, and some of which seem to be the code without the user interface. Very confusing. The images are sortable by several dozen aggregate descriptions, such as "Asset identifier" and "Color mode," which would require much background knowledge to be useful. There is no explanation offered as to how the images are chosen, how they relate to the rest of the collection, or how they relate to each other. They range from butter sculptures to light phenomena.

The graphics across the top of the screen are not explained either. Some appear to be play buttons, but the images that I found were stills. When the user clicks on an image, a box pops up that says: close/information/preview/original. Information is the metadata, which includes mostly data about the image and some free-form notes about the subject. However, the free-form nature of the notes means that some of it is ambiguous: the image of monks preparing color pallets, for example, has a date but the importance of the date is not explained. Is it when the image was taken, or added to the collection? In general, the metadata appears to serve far more of an administrative function than a resource-discovery one, for although "tibet" does call up this image, it is also tagged with "world peace" and the relationship to the image is not explained.

Generally, this digital library appears out of place with the rest of the site in that it does not even really seem to be designed for outside use. Perhaps it began as a digital asset management system? To integrate it into the rest of the student-targeted site it must be reworked, or a better user interface layered on top. For now, however good the images. it is extremely difficult to use. The rest of the site is much more accessible and also organized far differently, by theme, and offers little of no metadata. Is there no happy medium?