3. Participants in USEIN: Some considerations of information type, tools, and future partnerships

Many types of education information are well organized in the academic, special, state, and organizational libraries and archives in the United States. In addition, much information that is relevant to educators has emerged in electronic form on the World Wide Web. An inventory of such collections and the linking of them with pointers or access arrangements is a first step towards identifying what partnerships are needed (July, 1997).

The most unified source of education information is the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), which has a long history of strategic partnerships and organization for awareness, access, and delivery. Although primarily covering print resources since 1966, recent resources include Web sites linked by ERIC, under Clearinghouses and Adjunct Clearinghouses. ERIC has developed a framework for USEIN participation, along with a realistic perspective of the financial support needed to maintain existing ERIC service levels (ERIC Task Force on the Operations Framework, 1997).

Examining the screens of Web pages maintained by ERIC shows a wide variety of partnership efforts, from affiliation with parent advocacy groups to lists of university home pages. These need to be inventoried and described as part of planning for partnerships. It would probably be relevant to examine what aspects of ERIC' s partnerships have worked particularly well, since many of them have been long-standing, as a guide for expansion of partnerships for USEIN.

Academic institutions have materials potentially valuable in an education information network. Examples of information that is considered important for the academic sector include:

Prototypes of tools relate to more precise ways of identifying relevant sites on the Internet need to be considered for planning the USEIN. Web page recommender sites (information filtering) include Virtual Review and Fab, among others (Arnheim, 1997; Balabanovic & Shoham, 1997). News of these sites are exciting, but when one follows them from their print emergence to their presence on the Web, the results have been disappointing, e. g., too many have resulted in messages such as: "are to emerge in another form soon" (Virtual Review, 1997 ) or "can take no more users now" ( Fab, 1997). These interrupted academic ventures are potentially useful for USEIN, and need review as to what needs to be done to make them effective.

An inventory and description of each unique education Internet site is a slippery task, given the instability of access to such resources . Several recent developments in this area appear relevant. A URL Stability Index has been calculated for education association sites by the Scholarly Associations Project, University of Waterloo. The implementation of a PURL (Persistent URL, July, 1997) would be essential to such an inventory. Sutton's report on GEM (1997) describes another process useful in the organization of education resources. The Gateway to Education Materials will provide the educator with uniform descriptions of materials, such as lesson plans, so that relevance can be assessed quickly. A component of this effort was the development of a metadata structure that is applied uniformly. This project developed from a convening of stakeholders that seems similar to USEIN' s Kick-off Conference.

Other stakeholders in USEIN have entered into web ventures in partnership with industry and government The American Library Association is at the forefront of library organizations that have entered into partnerships with diverse partners. Public and private schools have emerged on the Web, in pages designed by teachers and students. These Web pages are exciting, providing a window on the thinking of the next generation. Further, Internet is actively used in classrooms for teaching and learning, as reported in dissertations prepared in 1997 (Fuchs, 1997; Stuve, 1997; Julian,1997; Martin,1997; Cohen, 1997; Seguin, 1997). The variety of uses of Internet-available information by K-12 educators is part of the information base for USEIN design.

Commercial ventures in organization of Web information have proceeded without benefit of Library of Congress headings. Even so, most would agree that Yahoo's subject tree for education is comprehensive and valuable, as seen in the numerous education Web pages that link to it as a gateway for their users. Other commercial ventures have collated web reviews, with caveats. Lycos has reviews of the "top five percent" of sites, Yahoo! collates reviews of sites reviewed in their magazine (http://www.yahoo.com/) These, and other commercial review pages specify their criteria, which vary from site to site.

Citizens with an education interest have formed networks in person, print, and electronically. Their interests and needs make them part of the process. A focus on the content on parent networks would provide insight into what kinds of information needs exist in the general public. ERIC's National Parent Information Network (NPIN) has served a valuable role by gathering sites, including newsletters, organizations, other parent-information sites, and resources for parents.
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[2. Partnership Structure and Practice]

[4. Case Study of Partnerships]