ACE--Here is some valuable educational material:
May 1, 1998
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Press Release For Immediate Release
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For more information contact:
Nancy Morgan, GEM Coordinator
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800-464-9107
315-443-3640
URL: http://www.geminfo.org
New Virtual Card Catalogue Links K-12 Educators with Internet Resources
The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) project at Syracuse
University has launched a virtual card catalog on the World Wide Web
that will help educators in the K-12 community have easy access to
thousands of Internet-based educational materials.
"This project's goal is to provide a new set of tools to get information
into the hands of educators quickly and easily so that children can
learn," says Michael B. Eisenberg, director of the ERIC
Clearinghouse on Information and Technology and professor of information
studies in SU's School of Information Studies (IST). Eisenberg and IST
faculty members Stuart Sutton and Ruth Small are co-principal
investigators for the GEM project.
Educators can access the Internet-based resources of participating GEM
consortium members through The Gateway (http://www.thegateway.org).
Using meta-data, the materials are organized in a massive virtual
card catalog. The Gateway's search engine allows users to locate
materials in the virtual world in the same way they would in a
traditional library--by subject, keyword or title.
GEM's searching tools also expand educators' searching capability to
include searching by grade levels, special needs and more.
Users are provided with detailed abstracts of the resources to help them
decided whether they want the material before linking to the site.
There are thousands of collections of educational materials on the
Internet that were just waiting for the right tools to come along that
would enable users to access them, Sutton says.
"Meta-data is simply a way of organizing the material," he says.
"Librarians solved that in the physical universe a long time ago. We're
simply trying to tame the virtual environment in the same way.
"Meta-data is a new word for a very old idea. The only difference is
that the 'cards' are distributed all over the Internet."
The software and training materials that are used to catalog the
resources and create The Gateway were developed by students at SU's
School of Information Studies.
The Gateway currently includes resources from the AskERIC Virtual
Library, the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse, the Math Forum,
Microsoft Encarta, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction,
the Virtual Reference Desk and the U.S. Department of Education.
Hundreds of titles are being added weekly.
GEM (http://www.geminfo.org) is a special project of the ERIC
Clearinghouse on Information & Technology. The project is being funded
by the U.S. Department of Education's National Library of Education.
Organizations with Internet-based educational resources who are
interested in joining the GEM Project should send an e-mail message to:
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