Integration of primary resource materials into elementary school curricula

The primary focus of the Digital Cultural Heritage Community Project is the digitization of materials from local area museums, archives and libraries for elementary grades' social science curricula. Using teachers' curriculum units and the Illinois Learning Standards for direction, primary source materials are identified by curators and librarians for inclusion in a digital repository. The repository metadata must be complex enough to easily integrate the different forms of metadata currently used by each institution, while, at the same time, being simple enough for facilitation by the elementary school users. Simultaneously, a collaborative agreement was developed to include a set of terms and conditions for digital access to collections, the right to distribute materials and permissions to host materials. We have thus far learned that each school district's interpretation of the state learning standards necessitated additional review of local standards to insure that the project addressed goals and objectives that were pertinent on a local as well as a state level. Curators and librarians have had to be innovative when choosing items to digitize, and teachers must be able to make use of materials in imaginative ways, as it was often apparent that there might, not always be a good fit between curriculum needs and the local area museum and library collections. Finally, we are developing a set of guidelines and standards to enable the creation of a consistent database, easily mapping between different controlled vocabularies and organizational data.