Dear all,
This message is about changes to publicly accessible British Education Index internet pages that may be of interest to you. (Some of you may see this several times: sorry! Notification is also being made through the BEI news pages at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/bei/beinews.htm where other potentially useful information may occasionally appear.)

The page at http://brs.leeds.ac.uk/~beiwww/beil.html allows searching of a subset of BEI database records. Hitherto, the purpose of that facility has been to give internet visitors unfamiliar with the BEI an idea about the kind of information contained in the full database. We have recently changed the restriction on records retrieved through this public interface. As from now (12 December 2003), the public interface will give access to records not yet available through the Dialog @Site or International ERIC databases or in the printed BEI.

All of the subscription services are updated quarterly while BEI staff are persistently creating records. At any given time, then, some records are invisible through the subscription services: these records are now visible through the public interface. Whenever an update is made to the subscription services available through Dialog, the restriction on public records will change to exclude records accessible through those services. The public interface page provides information about the timing and size of the last update to the public collection as well as the number of records currently available for searching through the public interface (at any time this is likely to be anything between 100 and over 1000 records). The page also presents an option to view only the records added in the most recent update. Information seekers may on occasion want to consult the public subset of records when they have conducted a search against any subscription-based version of the BEI.

We hope that you find this development helpful. Please feel free to pass this message on to other potentially interested parties not represented on the jiscmail lists at which it is primarily directed.

Best wishes,
Phil.

Phil Sheffield
Manager: British Education Index
Tel/Fax: 0113 3435524
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http://www.bei.ac.uk