GEM: Design and Implementation of a Metadata Project for Education,  by Carrie Lowe
Summary. The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) is a project funded by the Department of Education’s National Library of Education and a special project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology.  GEM catalogs and organizes educational materials on the Internet using metadata technology.  This article focuses on the development of the GEM metadata profile, a key step in the development of the GEM project.  Research activities contributing to the development and the refinement of the of GEM metadata profile are presented, as well as two case studies that apply the GEM metadata profile.

Metadata for a Digital Library of Educational Resources, by Jane Greenberg,  Karen Fullerton, and Edie Rasmussen
Summary. PEN-DOR (the Pennsylvania Education Digital Object Repository) is a digital library providing access to atomic web-based objects for lesson plan construction, a set of fully constructed lesson plans, and curriculum standards for the state of Pennsylvania.  PEN-DOR supports lesson plan construction and enhancement activities.  Through a community-based memory documentation process, PEN-DOR plans to provide access to the collective experience of teachers, students, and public school administrators working with the repository's resources.  The diverse activities supported by PEN-DOR present a series of challenges in organizing and accessing web-based objects, lesson plans, and other PEN-DOR resources for use.   This article focuses on the development and implementation of the PEN-DOR metadata scheme, and discusses a number of metadata-related challenges that have emerged as a result of the project. 

Managing Digital Educational Resources with the ARIADNE Metadata System, by E. Duval, E. Vervaet, B. Verhoeven, K. Hendrikx, K. Cardinaels, H. Olivié, E. Forte, F. Haenni, K. Warkentyne, M. Wentland Forte, and F. Simillion
Summary. The primary goal of the ARIADNE project, supported by the European Commission, is to foster share and reuse of digital pedagogical material. For this purpose, a Europe-wide repository of reusable pedagogical documents, called the Knowledge Pool System (KPS) has been set up. One of the key features of the KPS is the underlying metadata specification, which has been used in extensive experiments.  The ARIADNE metadata scheme includes both mandatory and optional elements, and is at the basis of the emerging Learning Objects Metadata  standard, developed by the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee.  This article presents the ARIADNE metadata scheme and discusses ARIADNE tools developed to support metadata authoring and indexing, database querying, and course development activities.  A discussion of the ARIADNE community’s experience is also presented.

Disiecta Membra: Construction and Reconstruction in a Digital Catalog of Greek Sculpture, by Amy C. Smith
Summary. Ancient sculpture is fragmentary.  Some sculptures exist only in pieces; others have been split up; and many of the ancient world’s most famous statues now survive only in multiple copies created later than the originals.  This paper discusses the evolution of a Greek sculpture catalog on the Perseus Project and its recent redesign that brings the visitor's attention to these complexities of ancient art.  A data field in our 4th Dimension database categorizes artworks according to their degree of entirety and automatically generates links to related objects.  More than one relation for each object is permitted, which encourages users to investigate the whole range of possible connections.  This multirelational database enables our next phase of catalog development, which will include the construction of series of copies, the contextualization of groups of sculptures, and the reconstruction of lost originals.

The National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS) Project: Reinventing Undergraduate Engineering Education Through Remote Cataloging Of Digital Resources, by Brad Eden
Summary. The Synthesis Coalition has developed computer courseware modules that can be readily transferred and adapted to different student and campus needs via the Internet using the National Engineering Education Delivery System, or NEEDS.  This article provides an overview of the Synthesis Coalition and documents the NEEDS cataloging effort.   In documenting NEEDS, the article examines both the application of library standards to Internet-accessible and retrievable information, and an experiment in remote cataloging supported that resulted from the materials developed by the Synthesis Coalition.  The article also comments on the future of telecommuting and remote cataloging of digital resources.

Providing Access to Course Material at Deakin University, by Cate Richmond and Ebe Kartus
Summary. Deakin University Library was requested by Deakin Australia, the corporate arm of Deakin University, to suggest ways to provide access to their course material. The project looked at how metadata could be incorporated retrospectively and into new print and electronic course material. Although the material is produced in two formats, the archival format would be electronic. Even though access to the Deakin Australia material would be by instructional designers only, the project was seen as the first steps in the exploration of issues the Library would need to consider in providing public access to the University's general course material. This article outlines the recommendations made to Deakin Australia and the reasons behind them.

Using the Online Catalog as a Publishing Source In an Academic Institution, by Ana Torres and Cynthia Wolff
Summary. This article reports on the Digital Library Project initiated in 1995 at the Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York. The project’s goal was to deliver electronic information generated by faculty and/or university organizations through the online catalog, by providing a seamless link from a bibliographic record in the OPAC to the electronic item via the Internet.  Catalysts for the project included the faculty's need to share and distribute electronic information and the library's need to reduce traffic at the Service Desk, where course materials were kept.  Student can now access course-related material remotely, eliminating long lines at the Service Desk and faculty can exchange electronic information on a secure network.

Cataloging Economics Preprints: an Introduction to the RePEc Project, by José Manuel Barrueco Cruz and Thomas Krichel
Summary. Cataloging resources that assist in educating a domain specific community can require a finer level of granularity than objects that are to be accessed by a more general domain community, and can become a costly process. One possible approach towards cataloging such resources is to get a community of providers involved in cataloging the materials that they provide. This paper introduces RePEc (http://netec.wust.edu/RePEc), as an example for such an approach. RePEc is mainly a catalog of research papers in Economics. RePEc is based on set of over 80 archives, which all work independently but are interoperable.  The key issue of the paper is to evaluate the success in providing data of reasonable quality a decentralized approach.

Capturing Context in Action: Metadata for the Web Delivery of Best Educational Practice, by Richard Giordano
Summary. This paper outlines metadata issues for documents created for a web-based environment concerned with issues of best educational practices.  Metadata describing the documents related to educational practice  must be able to describe context of the practice.  Moreover, document structure itself is problematic because, in a web-based environment, a document that appears on a user's workstation as a single object may in fact be an assembly of  linked, yet discrete, documents residing in distributed databases.   The paper discusses in detail the problem of describing the context of practice, a distributed document architecture, and metadata based on the Dublin Core and GEM metadata standard.  The paper ends with a discussion of weaknesses of the Dublin Core when documenting physically distributed documents. 

Structured Metadata Spaces, by Thomas D. Wason and David Wiley
Summary. This paper will present the concepts of a metadata space as it relates to cataloging and discovery.  A space has multiple dimensions; in the case of resource metadata, these are descriptive dimensions. We will explain the needs for orthogonal descriptive dimensions, and present a method for achieving maximally efficient, independent dimensions using semantic structures realized in structured metadata.  A specific example of this system as developed in the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC P1484) Learning Object Metadata (LOM) will be presented. The LOM is the collaborative work of many organizations including ADL, AICC, ARIADNE, GESTALT, and IMS. The scope of the concepts presented in this paper encompasses general concepts of metadata systems.

Discovering and Using Educational Resources on the Internet: Global Progress or Random Acts of Progress? By William H. Graves
Summary. What will be the strategic impact of the Internet on education?  This article addresses that question and in the process also addresses the resource discovery themes that inform this special issue of the Journal of Internet Cataloging.  Indeed, recent progress in disintermediating the cataloguing and indexing of educational resources portends a future in which indexing and cataloguing professionals will work at the boundary of mediation/disintermediation by contributing to the formulation of Internet standards that enable disintermediation.