"I am a seventh-grade social studies teacher. How can I find seventh grade social studies lessons using this service?" Information Institute of Syracuse ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology KidsConnect Virtual Reference Desk AskERIC AskERIC Lesson Plan Collection Gateway to Educational Materials ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology GEM meta-data "GEM added other meta-data elements to the Dublin Core which are tailored to the information needs of teachers."

The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) Project: Meeting the Needs of Teachers in the Information Age Carrie Lowe Project Representative Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) Project ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology Syracuse University Syracuse, NY An Introduction to GEM The Information Institute of Syracuse is an umbrella organization housing a number of well-known services in the field of educational technology. These include the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology, KidsConnect, and the Virtual Reference Desk. One of the best-known projects of the Information Institute of Syracuse is AskERIC. AskERIC provides answers to the questions of K-12 educators via email. In addition to the question and answer service, AskERIC has created a collection of tools for educators at its website, including a substantial collection of lesson plans. In early 1996, an official from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) presented the AskERIC Lesson Plan Collection to a group of teachers. As always, the collection of lessons received a warm response from educators, who are always on the lookout for good instructional ideas. The DOE official showed the teachers the wide range of materials available in the AskERIC collection, as well as the search engine available to users to find materials in the collection. As his speech drew to a close, the official noticed a raised hand in the audience. When he called upon the woman with the raised hand, she said, "I am a seventh-grade social studies teacher. How can I find seventh grade social studies lessons using this service?" The answer, of course, is that there was no good way for educators to find precisely what they want on the Web using existing technologies. Searching the AskERIC Lesson Plan Collection is akin to searching anywhere on the Web. Current search interfaces (such as Altavista, Excite, and HotBot) scan entire HTML documents for keywords the user enters. These searches have a high rate of return with little precision — meaning, when you search the Internet you get back many, many hits, but little of what you are really looking for. Take, for example, the teacher who raised her hand in the AskERIC presentation. She might enter a query such as <+"social studies" +lesson +plan> into the AskERIC search engine. This tells the search engine that she wants documents that contain those three terms. The teacher also specified that she works with seventh grade students. How would she enter that into the search? She would need to include many different terms (such as grade, seven, seventh, 7) to make sure that she included all of the ways that an author could express the concept "seventh grade". This type of searching is time consuming, cumbersome, and incredibly complicated. The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) Project, a consortium effort funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Library of Education and a special project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology (which also runs the AskERIC project), seeks to make finding educational materials on the Internet faster and easier. The GEM Consortium includes both user groups and collection holders. The GEM Project has several components. The term GEM refers to the project itself, including all of its parts. The Gateway is the catalog of educational resources, the final product of the GEM project. The GEM Profile refers to the meta-data elements which have been chosen to describe the resources in The Gateway. GEMCat is the software developed by the GEM research team, which is used to create and imbed meta-data elements. Each of these terms will be explained and explored in more detail below. Meta-Data: A Tool for Organizing the Internet Meta-data is structured information that describes, manages, and organizes Internet resources. The easiest way to understand this concept is to think about a library catalog card. The card describes a resource (it may be a book, videotape, or CD), listing its title, author, location, and other information. Catalog cards can then be filed, and used to locate resources throughout the library. Meta-data works much the same way. It can be used to describe an object on the Internet (such as an HTML document), and much like in a card catalog, can be used to pinpoint information on the Internet. HTML tags specify the appearance of a document on the Web. With HTML, designers can create eye-catching, attractive Web resources. The problem with HTML is that it has nothing to do with the intellectual content of a document. This makes little sense; HTML dictates the appearance of resources on the Web, but ignores what the resource is about. Meta-data tags look much like HTML tags (see Figure 1), but they specify content instead of appearance. Search engines that are designed to use meta-data are able to search the tags themselves to find specific information, rather than scanning the entire Web document looking for key words. Figure 1: Meta-data produced by GEMCat Meta-data is a concept which has been receiving a great deal of attention lately. Many people view resource description as the answer to the problem of finding information in the vast Internet library. The Dublin Core is an emerging resource description standard that uses meta-data. The Dublin Core was determined through a series of meetings of experts from a variety of fields, including librarians and computer scientists. The Dublin Core is a list of elements which can be used to describe any information resource. The Dublin Core allows for materials of a range of formats (PDF files, sound files, HTML documents); it is also general enough to accommodate nearly any intellectual topic. The Dublin Core is: Coverage Creator Date Description Format Identifier Language Contributors Publisher Relation Resource Type Rights Source Subject Title The Dublin Core has been identified as the emerging resource description standard for the Internet. This made it an excellent starting place for the GEM Project. GEM uses the Dublin Core as the foundation for its meta-data set. The Dublin Core itself is too general to describe educational resources in a way that would be useful for teachers. A key aspect of the Dublin Core is that it allows other elements to be added to it and its existing elements to be expanded to better describe information resources from various subject areas (Sutton, in press). GEM added other meta-data elements to the Dublin Core which are tailored to the information needs of teachers. These elements, which are based on research detailed below, are: Audience Cataloging Agency Duration Essential Resources Grade Level Pedagogy Quality Indicators Academic Standards By combining the Dublin Core element set and the GEM elements, a tool is created which allows catalogers to create a complete description of an educational resource on the Internet — the GEM meta-data profile. To learn more about the GEM meta-data profile, go to: http://www.geminfo.org/Workbench/Metadata/metadata_index.html. To page 2 of 4