![[Table of Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
A brief qualitative analysis of Education Web pages focuses on the partnerships behind the pages. Looking closely at pages already prepared yields information about the social and conceptual organization involved in their preparation. Education Web pages gathered from responses to a posting to the EBSS-L Listserv were explored. (A full listing of the Web pages used for this analysis follows the References).
Although there is much information in the Web pages potentially available for thematic analysis and examination for sources of information, this scan focuses only on the occurrences of existing partnerships apparent on the Web pages. The categories of partnerships that emerged from examination were: within-institution partnerships, cross-sector partnerships, commercial partnerships, and support partnerships (other than commercial). The inclusion of ERIC and the National Library of Education on a web page was also checked. Financial support of the web pages was gleaned from acknowledgments. This "first pass" at examining the web pages revealed a convergence of commercial, institutional, government, and library resources involved in the design of the pages.
Many of the Web pages examined were prepared by teams within a university. The most common partnerships were with: computer programmers, Department of Education faculty, students, local school systems and other librarians, acknowledged either in the response to the list posting or on the page itself. All pages examined had links with other organizations, thereby crossing many discipline boundaries. Cross-fertilization is rampant: other libraries' and organizations' sites are commonly linked. Such linking includes all or parts of another library's education. Links held in common that were prepared by other librarians included lesson plan collections, journal annotations (Carr, 1997b), and "webliographies" (Caspers, 1997).
The Web pages examined regularly linked to commercial Webs as organizing devices. Yahoo! was the most frequently linked commercial indexing source. Other commercial sources frequently linked included Academic and Instructor magazines. The Department of Education site, linked to by all pages, has a listing of commercial Web search engines available for all to explore.
As one would expect, all pages had links to ERIC. The arrangement of the links varied in the layer one would find the link. Some pages organized local resources first, with federal and other academic links appearing in deeper levels of organization, conversely, others had ERIC as one of the first sites linked to access.
Links to the NLE were not seen across all sites. Those links to NLE that did appear varied in the level one had to access before reaching the link.All sites were supported by their parent institutions, as seen by copyright statements and institution names. Some support can perhaps be inferred by the existence of links to foundations, such as the Getty Foundation for the Study of the Arts. Some sites were supported in their formation through grant funding (Fiscella, 1997).
The interweaving of commercial, academic, and government aspects were seen on many sites. Publishers and educational materials producers have made catalogues available on the web, materials that are collected by school districts and curriculum centers (such as Scholastic Publishers at http://www.scholastic.com and journals at http://www.academic.com). Reviews and evaluations of these publications and products are sparse, indicating another information gap that USEIN may choose to try to fill.
-###-
[5. Partnerships Categorized]