**Apologies for cross posting**
For many years now, we have all been struggling with managing electronic only publications within our traditional library collections. Publications may be freely and easily accessible at the time of publishing, but subsequently documents ‘disappear’ from the internet, official bodies are closed, merged or reconstituted and their work, if published electronically, is often impossible to track down. Both the British Library’s Digital Preservation project and the National Archives UK Government Web Archive are doing important work in this area, but we decided we needed to develop an inclusive fully searchable digital archive for such publications in the subject area of education.
For the last year a team of colleagues from Collection Development Services, Cataloguing and Technical Services at the Institute of Education library have been working hard on this, and we are very excited to announce that the IOE Digital Education Research Archive (DERA) is now available for use by researchers and other interested parties worldwide.
DERA is a digital archive of documents published electronically by government and related bodies in the area of education. We are committed to making it permanently and freely accessible to all. Of course, it is still a work in progress – but already there are already approximately 1000 full text documents available. This includes BECTA‘s digital publication archive which is now permanently preserved and available for all.
This is definitely a work in progress, but we would very much welcome comments on any aspect of DERA. We have it listed on the library web page alongside our other education databases , or you can access it direct at http://dera.ioe.ac.uk.
Or feel free to email me direct [log in to unmask]
Rozz Evans
Collection Development Librarian
Library
Institute of Education, University of London
20 Bedford Way
London
WC1H 0AL
Tel: +44 (0) 207 612 6484
Fax: +44 (0) 207 612 6093
Email: [log in to unmask]
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