By Thomas Minkus

Charlene Gaynor, CEO of the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP), spoke with Publishing Perspectives at the annual Content in Context Conference in Washington DC about the digital transformation in educational publishing.

Gaynor said the primary goal of the conference is to assess the digital transformation in education and to help publishers navigate these changes: “What our publishers are trying to find out here is how rapid is that transformation, how quick do they need to be in terms of responding to it and preparing for it, and then how to prepare for it.”

The AEP also made several announcements during the conference. The first was the a new cooperation with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) which will combine the AAP’s annual school division conference with the annual conference of the AEP. Gaynor said this would “give us both better programming” as well a joint focus on making the value of professionally published educational materials more obvious in a world of free and open-source content.

The second announcement was that the AEP will co-lead an initiative with Creative Commons to develop a metadata framework for the learning resources industry to improve Internet search results. This framework will work with schema.org, a new initiative used by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! aimed at providing better search results of Web content.