QIC: Query In Context for Educational Collections

Students‟ demand for rich, multimedia content to be incorporated into their learning process has driven teachers to use online resources. With its accessibility and explosive growth of content, the NSDL repositories are in a prime position to provide the quality material teachers and other knowledge seekers need. Still, teachers are dissatisfied with this resource. They are frustrated with the time-consuming manual effort to retrieve and review each link when searching for the appropriate material. This often leads to settling for “good enough” content. As these collections become larger, the number of hits on a keyword based search will increase. To sustain and increase the utilization of NSDL‟s quality resources, it is important that a more sophisticated methodology for query and retrieval be developed.