I have to stop myself from becoming too evangelical about the British Education Index, but as a librarian and a recent MA student, the BEI is one of the education resources I could not do without (the IOE library catalogue is another). For years the BEI has quietly, diligently and expertly indexed important articles, conferences and other education resources while offering both free and subscription services. While we at the IOE are lucky to have access to the recently enhanced subscription service provided by Proquest, unfortunately, after sustained efforts to obtain funding for the free service, Education-line will be changing.
From today, the 6th of February, the BEI’s free collections will be reduced. More context about these changes can be found on the BEI’s website at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/bei or http://www.bei.ac.uk and two blogs.
- The BEI blog at http://blog.library.leeds.ac.uk/blog/bei is aimed at providing information about developments.
- The BEI, information services and turbulent times blog at http://blog.library.leeds.ac.uk/blog/beiandwider considers the problems of working with information during tough times.
I’m grateful to you for picking this up so quickly Barbara, and for the kind words. Just to clarify that Education-line itself isn’t changing, except by growing: the database of 6,000+ conference papers represented by Education-line continues to be freely accessible. What has gone from our site is free access to a comparably sized collection of references to documents freely accessible on the internet, and to a collection of references to recent journal articles. Everything we index is in the Proquest Dialog version of the database. The losers are the people who don’t/can’t subscribe to that, and that is very regrettable. On the plus side, they continue to get, through Education-line, access to a substantial and unique collection of information.