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Education Information
Before planning the implementation of the United States Education Information Network (USEIN), it is important to focus on exactly what would constitute the information that will be disseminated by USEIN. For the purposes of this paper, the assumption has been made that USEIN will be primarily an electronic information network connecting the diversity of sources and resources.
An understanding of what constitutes "education information" needs to encompass prior perspectives, (such as Library of Congress Subject Headings and Dewey Subject Headings, ERIC Descriptors, Education Index controlled vocabulary) as well as current practice on Internet. Education information, if conceived broadly, involves many parameters: practice, process, history, legislation, public interest, and pedagogy research, to mention a few. A definition of "education" demonstrates the enormous conceptual territory that would be covered by information about education:
Education. 1. Any process, formal or informal, that helps develop the potentialities of human beings, including their knowledge, capabilities, behavior patterns, and values. 2. The developmental process provided by a school or other institution that is organized chiefly for instruction and learning. 3. The total development acquired by an individual through instruction and learning. 4. In business or official connections, the institutional instruction that the individual has had. 5. The area of study concerned with teaching and learning, including professional teacher education. (from A Concise Dictionary of Education, p.72)
Without boundaries defined for the beginning USEIN, the workloads involved in "covering" the total field for the diversity of users and producers would be overwhelming without considerable assets (staff and budget). There is a start-up priority for a working definition of what constitutes education information for the purposes of USEIN. Such a working definition must consider scope as well as audience (who will be using the information? Teachers? Students? All?) Also, any definition needs to be provisional, since current practice may reshape the boundaries through evaluations of USEIN in the future.
Characteristics of Education Information and Its Users
Education as a field has a public quality to it not seen in other knowledge communities: Education is mandated and monitored by legislation and agencies at all levels of implementation, has advocacy groups that emerge from many sectors of the public, and receives mandated local, state, and federal support. Users and producers of education information are a multi-cultural community, mirroring the society as a whole. Despite the challenges presented, the task of education community description needs attention so that information unification efforts are not strictly based on technology (Pahre, 1996). Knowing the stakeholders in this community and how they are socially arranged, in conjunction with the ways information is generated and dispersed by them, is important for USEIN.
"Knowledge Community" as defined in a sociology of knowledge perspective (Pahre, 1996), focuses on the boundaries, methods of acquiring knowledge, transmission and diffusion of knowledge, and development of new sub-fields. Attention to this perspective in identified scientific communities has received three decades of attention There are difficulties involved in trying to transfer the "sociology of knowledge" perspective , to education as described by Pahre in an article about social sciences information organization (1996). It has been done, as seen in the organization of the LC Subject Headings and in encyclopedias of education. Yet, more is needed: Education as a field is more diverse than scholarly compilations or library organization schemas. And education on the Internet encompasses sources not reflected in prior controlled vocabularies. The social connective structure might be described as a community of communities, since education encompasses varied methodologies, disparate review systems, differing practice situations, and an uneven diffusion of research findings. The very character of the field is shaped by the multiplicity of sources, knowledge structures, and communication paths, all made even more visible through rapid expansion of the Internet.
Research on the specific skills for uses of education information by school administrators and staff (Davis, 1987), graduate students (Morner, 1993; Libutti, 1991; Libutti and Kopala, 1995), graduate education faculty (Zaporozhetz, 1987), and children (Bergman et al. 1990) provide limited perspectives on practice. New studies have been done on the users of networked education information, which is needed to provide important information for user-centered design of the USEIN network ( Fuchs, 1997; Stuve, 1997; Julian,1997; Martin, 1997; Cohen, 1997; and Seguin, 1997). Although research is not uniformly in place about all stakeholders for an education information network, Web sites provide discrete windows on what is valued for most of them. An emergence of K-12 Web pages is a window on the kinds of information teachers and students consider important. Similarly, the creation of education Web pages by academic librarians provide priority perspectives for the academic sector. The ERIC Clearinghouses provide Web links which connect a diversity of users and producers, all important for the consideration of who uses education information. Leading producers of education information, such as the Buros Institute, have contributed to resources on the Internet that is relevant for the USEIN.
The use of Web technology makes it possible for any producer and any user to be involved in the production of education information. This surge in publication possibility does have a "down side": the proliferation of available information and need for filtering of information for importance. This task will be crucial for USEIN: a simple connection of all available education information would not be as valuable a product as a site linking well considered, evaluated pages (Arnheim, 1997).
An examination of Education Web pages indicates that fluidity of boundaries is needed. Members of the Education and Behavioral Sciences Section, ACRL, provided the author with URL's for the pages they created. Since these librarians have linked resources relevant to their constituencies, looking at what resources have been selected provides a snapshot of priorities of information linkage for particular users.
The following examples of education information available on Web pages demonstrate the often unique contributions made by education librarians. (The librarians, their institutions, and URL's are listed after References at the end of this paper). The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for example, maintains a curriculum materials Web page which includes the curiosity-eliciting entry: "Jackdaws", prepared by Judy Walker (1997). The University of Oregon at Corvallis has a page with a search process diagram prepared by Jean Caspers (1997). Lesson plan archives have been collated by Deborah Rollins, University of Maine (1997). Education book reviews have been prepared and mounted at the University of Michigan by Kate Corby. The University of Delaware's Learning Resource Center has a lengthy listing of bibliographies online., as well as local information about Delaware Education initiatives (Beth Anderson, 1997).
Annotated education journal listings have been collaboratively compiled and can be accessed through the University of Wiscinsin, Madison (Jo Ann Carr, 1997). Commercial sites have been linked to the University of Mississippi site (Sheila Wheat, 1997). Marsha Tate and Jane Alexander of Widener prepared a Power Point presentation on evaluating Web information, as have several other librarians (Auer, 1997). These kinds of resources might best be organized along a Library Orientation Exchange (LOEX) model, and cataloged (July, 1997).
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[2. Collaborative Partnership Structure and Practice]