The Climate Literacy Catalog was developed in the Fall of 2008 by Mark S. McCaffrey of CIRES Education and Outreach as a "next step" toward a reviewed and annotated collection of "cream of the crop" high quality digital resources that support the Essential Principles of Climate Literacy. Building on experience gained through the development of the Climate Change Collection, the goal of this phase of the effort is to begin to assemble a catalog of online resources that in the near future will be reviewed i) for scientific accuracy and currency by science experts, ii) for ease of use and appropriateness in educational settings and iii) annotated with any suggestions, concerns or ideas for enrichment and extensions to the resource.

The cataloging process has been conducted on the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) Content Management System, which was also used in the development of the Climate Change Collection. SERC is host to numerous digital collections relating to Earth System Science Education, and part of the cataloging process involved examining existing resources within the SERC catalog, and, when resources were found that aligned to the Essential Principles and/or fundamental concepts of Climate Literacy, they were added to the catalog and tagged to reflect the specific principles and concepts they related to.

In addition, selected new resources not previously included in the overall SERC catalog were added, many of them contributed by participants to the Climate Literacy Network ( This site may be offline. ) website who were invited to add suggestions of online resources and websites to be cataloged and considered for review and annotation. All resources that were suggested through the Fall of 2008 have been added to the catalog.

The resources that make up the current Climate Literacy Catalog are representative of all the principles and concepts of the framework as it existed in the Fall of 2008; there is at least one resource that related to each fundamental concept. However, in December of 2008 through January of 2009, a new iteration of the Essential Principles of Climate Science Literacy was developed through a peer review process involving climate researchers and science educators including the Climate Change Science Program ( This site may be offline. ) (CCSP) Principals and representatives of key federal agencies. While the new version has substantial overlap with the original, the existing catalog will need to be revisited and resources will in some cases need to be re-tagged. In addition, before the proposed review and annotation is conducted, (potentially through an interdisciplinary "boot camp" involving climate experts and educators in the summer of 2009 pending funding,) more resources should be cataloged to increase the depth and variety of the catalog as well as to specifically address new concepts added to the Essential Principles of Climate Literacy.

Another related "next step" on the pathway to a high quality Climate Literacy Digital Library Collection involves working with AAAS Project 2061 and the National Science Digital Library to link the selected resources to the online science literacy "strand maps" that will provide educators access to "cream of the crop" resources that correlate to the benchmarks and related research conducted by AAAS Project 2061 on misconceptions and cognitive development.

We are grateful to the NOAA Climate Program Office for its support of this effort.