By Paul Nowak

- EE-Link Criteria for Linking to Web Sites

Where can EE-Link add the greatest value to Environmental Education resources online? In some cases, we will create new materials that fill an unmet need for the EE community. But in many cases, our directories of links to other EE resources are the best service we can provide. Our goal is to promote the best EE materials available; this page explains how we decide which materials are best.

You may submit a link suggestion to the EE-Link staff via the add-a-link form at any time. We do ask that you take a few moments to read about our criteria and procedures for linking to other sites, and to make sure the site you are suggesting would be appropriate for our audience.

Criteria for Linking to Other Sites

In our quest to uphold the highest standards for environmental education, EE-Link has adopted some of the basic principles laid out in NAAEE's publication, Environmental Education Materials: Guidelines for Excellence.

EE-Link also observes the following additional site-linking criteria specific to the needs of our audience.

We will create a link to any site that:

Offers valuable EE resources for K-12 professional educators;

Is well maintained and has a clearly identified maintainer;

Is dedicated to promoting education and/or environmental information.

EE-Link will not create a link to any site that:

supports antigovernment positions or actions;

Represents work to influence legislation or elected officials at the municipal, state, or federal levels;

Is simply a list of an individual’s own set of bookmarks in the topic area of EE or the environment;

Contains adult themes or sexually explicit text, images, or photographs. (major search engine and database sites like Yahoo and InfoSeek are exceptions to this rule);

Advertises liquor, tobacco, or pornographic products.

* New resources that are uploaded by EE-Link must be copyright free, or EE-Link must have prior written permission to upload the material.

Procedures

When asked to provide a link to another site, EE-Link will review the site against our criteria. If you suggest a new site link to us, we will respond once we have reviewed the site and either let you know where the link is, or explain why we have not provided a link to your site.

Sites change in content regularly. If a site or one of its links no longer meets EE-Link's guidelines, the link to the site will be deleted. EE-Link staff is constantly reviewing sites, technical checks are done twice a month and inappropriate sites are removed in the course of regular site maintenance.

Audience

Should we try to provide better service to current users, or identify a target audience and then build EE-Link specifically for its needs, assuming the audience will find the resource once it exists? We seek a balance between these two approaches -- keeping our target audience’s needs in mind while responding to our current audience’s requirements.

EE-Link's audience is:

• Classroom Teachers

• Curriculum Developers

• Administrators

• Researchers

• Pre-service and In-service providers

• Non-formal institutions supporting K-12

• Non-formal professional educators

• Students

• Media Specialists/Librarians that support above groups [pmsin]In addition to these populations we hope to be of service to other information providers, such as:

• NAAEE affiliates (State EE Associations)

• State agencies with EE programs

• Publishers

• Higher-level WWW services such as ERIC and ENC.

In practice, classroom teachers have been the largest group of EE-Link users. As a result, our site has shifted its efforts to respond to teachers’ needs.

Sub Themes

Defining our audience has caused several new sub-themes for EE-Link content to emerge. Under the objectives of our workplan, we will develop these themes and incorporate them into our site linking criteria:

• Standards based education & EE

• Education reform & EE

• Science education & EE

• EE with culturally diverse groups and urban EE

• State Capacity Building (in partnership with NEEAP and NAAEE)