Program: Improving Human Research Potential and the Socio-Economic Knowledge Base - IMPROVING

Enhancing Access to Research Infrastructures

       Pedagogical and Educational Research Information Network for Europe (PERINE)

This project connects national information infrastructures to expose them and to promote their appropriate and more efficient use by educational researchers, policy makers and practitioners. The proposed network is founded on existing relationships between members of the Information Centres and Libraries in Educational Research Network of the European Educational Research Association (EERA). All project partners operate nationally significant information services which contribute to national infrastructures. In addition to improving the visibility and understanding of their existing resources, the partners will collaboratively establish a multilingually and freely accessible catalogue to internet resources. Through this catalogue the partners, already engaged in such work, will provide English and native language information about evaluated, described and indexed national resources. The cooperation is beneficial both in itself, in associating complementary information infrastructures and in promoting interoperability and international standards, and in its most practical result, the multilingual internet resource catalogue.

Objectives

This project will expose the national information infrastructures which support educational research and promote their good use. It addresses a number of perceived failings in information distribution and use which may be common to other disciplines. Operators of the services represented in the proposal are aware that their information is not optimally used even within their own countries. All of the services provide information of interest to researchers in other European countries as well as in their own: use of the services in foreign countries is low. From a service user's perspective, interests will range over national boundaries and enquiries exclusively to "local" resources may well not satisfy them. A lot of useful information remains hidden. The closer integration of information and research infrastructures will better inform decision making. The project will exploit the expertise of infrastructure operators and the relationships open to them to expose information about the nature, accessibility and content of their own, of other national and of other cross-national services, and to engage with researchers regarding their information needs.

Project participants

• British Education Index, University of Leeds, UK
• Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur (Federal Ministry for Education, Research and Culture), Austria
• Danmarks Pædagogiske Bibliotek (National Library of Education), Denmark
• Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (German Institute for International Educational Research), Germany
• Istituto nazionale di documentazione per l'innovazione e la ricerca educativa (National Institute for Documentation of Educational Innovation and Research), Italy
• Kauno technologijos universitetas (Kaunas University of Technology Library, affiliated with the Institute of Educational Studies at Kaunas University of Technology and the Lithuanian Educational Research Association), Lithuania
• Országos Pedagógiai Könyvtár és Múzeum (Hungarian National Library of Education -National Educational Library and Museum), Hungary
• Schweizerische Koordinationsstelle für Bildungsforschung (Swiss Co-ordination Centre for Research in Education), Switzerland

All of these organisations are infrastructure operators. Some work will be subcontracted by the co-ordinator to the Secretary General of the European Educational Research Association to conduct an evaluation of the network's impact on European research communities.

The network will conduct some activities in association with EURYDICE, specifically relating to use and development of the European Education Thesaurus (EET), and with CEDEFOP, specifically relating to internet resource linkage and the European Research Overview (ERO) of vocational education and training and human resource development.