The Gateway to Educational Materials is a Consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to thousands of educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites. This project is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.

The GEM project is based on an online educational information search engine, called "The Gateway". Through "The Gateway", Internet users can search various kinds of educational information such as class syllabi, educational web page addresses, books and museums by keyword, title, or contents.

Institutions that would like to provide resources to "The Gateway" should have a membership. Member institutions are required to make index of materials in possession. Metadata consists of title, contents description, grade level, GEM, ERIC descriptor, resource type, format, relevant information, copyright, data generation date, language, publisher and provider.

Once data have been collected, the system produces the index of the data in title, main body, author and grade level. Teachers and educators can find educational materials easily through "The Gateway" search engine. Users can search by Full Text, Subject, Keyword, Title or Description. "The Gateway" provides the list of relevant data with relevancy score, and this list is linked to the index of each data, thus users can easily find detailed information of the data. Users can access to the member institutions' database through linkage on the index.