FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact:
Dave Gladney Lauren Burke
LRMI KEH Communications
dgladney@publishers.org lauren@kehcomm.com
267-351-4329 410-975-9638
The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) Seeks Learning Resource Publishers’ Feedback
Survey seeks insight into content developers’ awareness of and strategy around metadata
Philadelphia, PA, February 11, 2014 – The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has launched a new survey to determine if and how publishers are currently tagging or describing their content with metadata. For organizations that are not yet actively engaged with metadata, the survey will explore the challenges and hurdles they face and what tools or supports they might need to get started. The survey is available online and is open now through Friday, February 21, 2014. Publishers who complete the survey will qualify for a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card.
The survey should take approximately five minutes to complete. In addition to gauging publishers’ knowledge of metadata initiatives that describe educational resources to improve online discoverability, survey questions seek insight that will ultimately help the LRMI better serve the publishing community. Sample questions from the survey include:
• Do you have plans to tag your resources with metadata in the coming year?
• How is LRMI metadata being used in your organization (or how will it be used if implementation is planned for the future)?
• Are there services/supports that would make it easier for you to tag resources using the LRMI specification? Please briefly describe these supports.
Surveys must be completed by February 21, 2014, and those who complete the survey and provide their email address will be entered to win one of three $50 Amazon gift cards. Results from the survey will be compiled in March 2014.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, the LRMI developed a common metadata framework for describing educational content and products on the web so educators, students, and parents can more efficiently search for quality resources. In April 2013, Schema.org, the consortium of search engines Microsoft Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex that is working to establish common metadata tagging across the Internet, adopted the LRMI schema. This means that the LRMI properties can now be indexed as part of the structured metadata that major search engines crawl in their searches.
“The driving force behind this survey is to better understand the landscape of the educational resource community when it comes to metadata,” said Dave Gladney, LRMI project manager at the Association of American Publishers PreK-12 Learning Group. “We want to know if they are aware of metadata initiatives to improve the discoverability of their materials and the experience of the end user; if they are tagging resources and how; and if they aren’t tagging resources, why not?”
To learn more about the LRMI, visit www.lrmi.net. Receive project updates directly by signing up for the free monthly LRMI newsletter, LRMI Update, here.
About The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative
The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) aims to make the educational resource search experience richer for educators and learners and improve the discoverability of resources for content creators. The Association of Educational Publishers (now the nonprofit arm of the Association of American Publishers) and Creative Commons have co-led the project since its founding in 2011.
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