I attended Umbrella 2011 last week – a conference and exhibition which attracted over 500 delegates from all sectors of the library and information world. I was there with a poster, hoping to spread the word about DERA to a wider audience and hopefully make some new contacts. I had many good conversations with people, and the general feeling was really positive. Although our initial audience is of course the higher education community, I discovered that it was also of potential use for volunteers in education, such as those serving on PTAs and school governors. In addition, it is being disseminated by librarians working for charities whose membership included teachers and other education professionals.

I also had some very useful comments from users regarding accessibility – some of the documents in DERA are apparently problematic for people with certain disabilities such as dyslexia to read, particularly the older ones that we are adding now so we clearly need to do some work on that.

We’d really welcome any other feedback from users.