Metadata for Education

These pages are intended to offer background information for attendees at the Metadata for Education meeting, to be held on 7 June at the London offices of Resource: the Council for Museums Archives and Libraries.

It is increasingly being recognised that effective use of metadata has the potential to aid discovery, use, and repeated re-use of valuable educational resources. These resources may exist in an online form or alternatively be described online, but accessed for use by some other means.

It is perhaps unfortunate that, despite the cross-community value of many of our resources, there appears to be little work underway which attempts to develop widely applicable approaches to the description and provision of such content. Across the breadth of the United Kingdom's educational sector, a wide number of approaches are being actively adopted with the long-term consequence that the learner's ability to move from resource to resource will be severely hampered. Several of these approaches draw upon de facto and de jure standards, whilst others have been entirely developed internally.

This meeting is an attempt to build some bridges between a number of the current players in this field, drawn from primary, secondary, tertiary and continuing education, as well as from relevant standards initiatives and the museum and library sectors, which have valuable content to offer.

It is hoped that this meeting will result in the identification of a programme of work, within which various UK approaches to the problem of describing educational resources can be more effectively integrated.

Organizational details should be addressed in the first instance to Paul Miller of UKOLN.

Information