About the Gateway Project

Mission

The Gateway expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. The Gateway's goal is to improve the organization and accessibility of the substantial collections of materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.

The Gateway is a nonprofit consortium membership organization serving educators and trainers at all levels in the USA and around the world.

Vision

The Gateway will be the world's leading metadata cooperative, helping educators serve students by providing access to educational knowledge through cutting edge innovation and collaboration.

History

The Gateway (formerly known as GEM) was developed with funds from the U.S. Department of Education to provide teachers with learning resources created by over 750 publicly funded organizations.  Oversight of the development of both the underlying GEM technologies and the Gateway website was provided by the US Department of Education with the guidance from the contributing member population in the way of an advisory board.  In 2005 the Gateway’s U.S. Dept. of Ed. funding ceased and the National Education Association stepped in to preserve this national education asset.   All the while, the technologist responsible for building the gateway as an internet accessible digital library were also contributing internationally the interoperability standards that make digital libraries work with each other.  These GEM standards have been the cornerstone for K-12 libraries built all over the world.  GEM scientists continue to contribute standards to open community of digital libraries, most notably the designation of “learning objective” within the learning resource record.  The Achievement Standards Network, or ASN, was developed to contribute a way for anyone to declare the objective associated with a digital resource.

Membership

Using the "The Gateway" is free to everyone, without membership. Consortium membership in the Gateway is only necessary if you would like your records made available in our search engine. To fill out an application for Consortium membership, go to the Join the Gateway link. There is no fee to join the GEM consortium.

Governance

The Gateway governance structure is divided into levels of GEM participation within six operational groups. A description of each group, its roles and responsibilities, its rights, and its membership requirements are described under the Governance Structure link.