CalEDLN will address the following needs of the environmental management community:

• Local management of data and information resources by its creators for the most effective stewardship and timely updates
• Sharing of information resources for others to access and harvest
• Creation of locally and regionally relevant information systems that include data and information directly from other libraries rather than attempt to duplicate those resources
• Access to data and information resources in online presentations that are relevant to user communities and easy to use and contribute to

CalEDLN will provide guidance and utilities for implementing the following core digital library methods:

• Standard digital library archiving and indexing methods that allow for interoperability with other groups' information. In particular, standard methods for:

1) Describing organizations, projects, people, data, and other information resources,

2) Capturing vocabularies used in indexing,

3) Capturing ontologies for semantically linking and querying, and

4) Posting, sharing, and harvesting all of these components

• Cataloging utilities and search tools that may be customized for use in local libraries
• Common, general vocabularies and registries for unification across distributed environmental libraries

CalEDLN will assist knowledge communities in developing their own digital library infrastructures by providing the following:

• Methods and tools for building domain-specific knowledge organization systems (vocabularies, placename thesauri, ontologies) that capture the issues and topics of information communities.
• A forum for collaborative development of new innovations useful to the greater community

For more information about CalEDLN, please see http://caledln.org