In 1996, the Minnesota Government Information Access Council (GIAC) issued a report titled, Digital Democracy: Citizens' Guide for Government Policy in the Information Age.

The Council articulated in that report a foundational principle that,

As anyone who has tried knows, finding government information can be very difficult,

and efforts to improve access to government information via the Internet have met with varying degrees of success. Because of the multiple ways in which material is described and made accessible online, discovery can be both time consuming and tedious. Locator services are being developed to catalog electronic resources such as web pages, image databases, geospatial data, statistical and scientific data sets, and so on, but these indices generally become less and less effective as the scope of their coverage expands. A more targeted, structured and descriptive approach to indexing electronic resources is needed for improved information search and retrieval.

The Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCMR) and the Minnesota State Legislature responded to this need by supporting a project proposed by a consortium of state environmental agencies to improve citizen access to environmental information: Foundations for Integrated Access to Environmental and Natural Resource Information.

The goal of the Foundations Project is,

Based on the Foundations Project research findings, and applying basic principles of information architecture, a Blueprint will be created specifying best practices and for electronic information access to state environmental data and information.

In summary, the objectives of the Foundations Project are to:

• Identify citizen-oriented needs for environmental information and data maintained by or available through state agencies.
• Design an approach for integrated access to environmental information and data that is consistent with emerging technology standards and best practices.
• Fully evaluate the effectiveness of the design for integrated access, using external reviewers representing a diverse range of public points of view.
• Design, evaluate and implement guidelines for documentation, thesaurus and metadata implementation to promote responsive search and retrieval procedures.
• Provide skilled assistance to state agencies to catalogue environmental information.
• Prepare a workable blueprint for improving discovery and retrieval of environmental information resources based on the findings of research and testing throughout the project.
• Conduct outreach to inform key user groups and to promote implementation of the blueprint throughout state government.

or contact:
Colleen Mlecoch, Project Manager 651-296-1305
Eileen Quam, Project Coordinator and Metadata Specialist 651-297-2341

• Is a concept that predates the web, having been coined in the 1960s to describe datasets effectively.
• Is generally defined as data about data.
• Provides basic information to describe the content of an information object such as the author of a work, the date of creation, links to any related works, etc. (A familiar form of metadata is the OCLC MARC record used to describe materials of various types and formats found in libraries.)
• Is used to facilitate information discovery and retrieval in a networked environment.

• It assists the effective discovery and retrieval of networked information resources. Metadata facilitates more sophisticated and comprehensive searching of information as the metadata elements and structures are designed to analyze content of the data in depth.
• It manages large amounts of data with low network bandwidth. Metadata addresses the issue of indexing large quantities of data of various types without requiring enormous network bandwidth. What gets indexed is the representational data rather than the information object itself.
• It integrates heterogeneous information resources. Information resources exist in different formats with different features in heterogeneous databases. Standard metadata description permits the comparing, sharing, integrating and reusing of various types of data in a distributed network environment. It is an important approach for finding information in heterogeneous databases.
• It controls restricted access information. Metadata can manage restricted-access information and services to users, e.g. billing, filtering and rating, privacy, and security. Metadata serves a gatekeeper function, an indispensable feature electronic commerce.