JISC

Education, as a subject, is covered in part by the subject gateways that form the JISC’s  Resource Discovery Network. A coherent coverage of education, however, is best met through a separate treatment of the subject. The British Education Internet Resource Catalogue and British Education Portal will strengthen coverage in this area and complement the existing RDN hubs. In turn, the project will benefit from the experience and documentation of the hubs and from the results of the Subject Portals Development Project (also funded as part of the DNER Development Programmes).

Aims and Objectives

The project’s overriding aim is to improve access to, and use of, information relating to educational issues. The specific objectives are to:

• Establish an internet resource catalogue (IRC) and, subsequently, a Portal to a range of resources supporting educational research, policy and practice
• Build on the strengths of selected databases managed by the British Education Index office to furnish Portal content
• Establish means for institutions to supply content for the IRC and portal databases
• Evaluate the impact of the new resources on information seeking behaviour within key user groups

Project design

Significant content for the IRC and Portal will be acquired in part through a network of trusted information providers within partner institutions (the Universities of Leeds, Exeter and Nottingham and the University of London’s Institute of Education). IRC correspondents will provide descriptions and indexing for internet resources. They will also provide information about the existence and availability of local resources of interest to users of databases managed by the BEI office (eg British Education Index, Education-line, Education Conference Listings, Education Conference Programmes). The project office will also build relationships with other information providers to deliver rich Portal content. Records specifically generated by the project will be indexed using the British Education Thesaurus which will also operate as a retrieval tool within the IRC.

Outcomes

The project will deliver a publicly accessible Internet service with a demonstration version of the IRC available June 2001. Subsequent development of the Portal, an integrated search environment, will follow on from the DNER work on portal prototypes. The relationships of the British Education Index office with groups, agencies and individuals operating in those sectors will deliver information appealing to further and higher education constituencies and beyond.