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With over 60,000 US K-12 science and mathematics education standards and a rapid proliferation of Web-enabled curriculum, retrieving curriculum that aligns with the standards to which teachers must teach is a key objective for educational digital libraries. However, previous studies of such alignment use single-dimensional and binary measures of the alignment concept. As a consequence, they suffer from low inter-rater reliability (IRR), with experts agreeing about alignments only some 20–40% of the time. We present the results of an experiment in which the alignment variable was operationalized using the Saracevic model of relevance ‘clues’ taken from the everyday practice of K-12 teaching. Results show high IRR across all clues with IRR on several specific alignment dimensions significantly higher than on overall alignment. In addition, a model of overall alignment is derived and estimated. The structure …