With its accessibility and explosive growth of content, the NSDL repositories are in a prime position to provide quality material teachers and other knowledge seekers need. Still, studies show teachers' dissatisfaction with online resources. They are frustrated with the time-consuming manual effort to retrieve and review each link when searching for appropriate material. This often leads to settling for good enough content. To sustain and increase the utilization of NSDL's quality resources, it is important a more sophisticated methodology for query and retrieval be developed. Query in Context for Educational Collections (QIC) is a research project utilizing context sensitive retrieval, semantic query analysis, and concept extraction techniques to create QIC's portable unified knowledge discovery system. QIC minimizes human intervention in the extraction process and reduces the number of contextually inaccurate results displayed. It revolutionizes individual search by shifting the burden of information overload from the user to the computer. QIC's functionality extends NSDL's NCore search services without significant changes to the format and organization of digital collections or extensive additional user provided data. With QIC, teachers find relevant information in the initially retrieved entries, thereby increasing satisfaction through reduced time and effort. This effectiveness improves digital library utilization, encourages knowledge seeking, and idea exploration. This contributes to the sustainability of NSDL and partner collections. QIC's long-term goal is to provide personalized information retrieval by discovering information in multiple formats and incorporating Web2.0 tools to improve the display and relevance of results.
