Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM): metadata for networked information discovery and retrieval
Stuart A. Sutton · Computer Networks and ISDN Systems · 1998
Enhanced access to educational materials on the Internet for the nation's teachers and students is one of President Clinton's second-term goals. In pursuit of this goal, the National Library of Education2 (NLE) identified lesson plans and teacher guides as a critical area in which library and information science expertise should be applied in order to improve the organization and accessibility of large collections of educational materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites. The U.S. Department of Education3 and the NLE charged the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology4 at Syracuse University with the task of spearheading a project to develop an operational framework to provide the nation's teachers with “one-stop/any-stop” access to this vast pool of educational materials. The goal of the Gateway to Educational Materials5 project (GEM) is to achieve this goal through development and deployment of a metadata element set and accompanying procedures for its use.