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AEP Calls for Input from Ed Publishers on LRMI Initiative

• By David Nagel
• 02/19/13

The Association of Educational Publishers are seeking input from education publishers on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, a project that aims to improve the way educators, students and publishers interact with learning resources through a common metadata framework.

In an effort to promote the initiative and the standard, LRMI's sponsors have launched a survey focused on determining education publishers' needs and raising awareness of the benefits of the standard.

"It's important for publishers to understand the potential impact of the LRMI because, once adopted, anyone who publishes or curates educational content will be able to use the LRMI markup to provide search engines or other delivery platforms with education-specific metadata about their resources," said Dave Gladney, LRMI project manager for AEP, in a prepared statement. "Ultimately, this will benefit publishers because their resources will become more discoverable."

LRMI, founded in 2011 and led by AEP and Creative Commons, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It's currently in the tail end of the second phase of its operations, focusing on implementing its metadata specification. LRMI's current specification, version 1.1, provides a means for tagging learning resources online. It's currently awaiting adoption as an extension to Schema.org's framework for tagging all content on the Web. Schema.org has the support of Google, Microsoft, And Yahoo!, among other stakeholders in online search.

The LRMI survey is open now through March 5. No registration is required.

Further details about LRMI can be found on lrmi.net. The LRMI survey can be accessed on SurveyMonkey.