The Materials Digital Library (MatDL), as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program, investigates research issues associated with the delivery of materials science information. Some project goals include: augmenting the educational experience for materials science and engineering students and exploring the role that domain-specific markup languages, such as Materials Property Markup Language (MatML), can play in digital libraries and the materials community. A pilot project provides a practical example of using MatML to supply materials property data to a web-based application program that enables students to generate graphs comparing selected properties across various materials. Property data marked up with MatML is parsed using existing libraries. Strategies under investigation for accessing the data include using: 1) a relational database as an intermediary between MatML and the application program, 2) MatML directly as a data format, and 3) a native XML database.