Mission

The Gateway to Educational Materials ^SM (GEM) expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. GEM'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.

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

Vision

GEM 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

Founded in 1996, GEM established and developed the architecture, software, and training materials necessary to build and maintain The Gateway to Educational Materials which was introduced in 1997. Enhancing the ability to search by state and national curriculum standards, expanding elements and vocabularies in postsecondary levels of education, and continuing research in cross-domain searching and systems interoperability, GEM is making improvements in software for use in metadata projects worldwide and in soliciting high quality resource collections for The Gateway^SM. The GEM metadata standards, GEM data files and applications for creating GEM metadata records are used today by collection holders around the world.

Membership

Using the "The Gateway" is free to everyone, without membership. Consortium membership in GEM 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 GEM link. There is no fee to join the GEM consortium.

Governance

The GEM 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.