Education-line draft acquisition policy May 1999

Comments and suggestions on the following text are welcome. Please email them to the Education-line Project Officer J.P.Saunders@leeds.ac.uk

The purposes of the Education-line collection

Education-line was established in 1996 with funding from the UK's four Higher Education Funding Councils' Joint Information Services Committee under the Electronic Libraries Programme so that "researchers, practitioners and policy makers from the worlds of education and training" could:

• "present their work at early stages, for immediate review by colleagues world-wide
• "store important documents for archiving
• "publish specialised or small scale texts to the widest possible audience
• "find reports and papers - in full - relevant to their own interests, using the sophisticated search tools of the British Education Index
• "contribute to debates about the work through on-line commentary see the latest reports, as they appear, on a daily basis"

(quoted from Education-line Purposes <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/purposes.htm> last modified November 1 1997)

The purpose of the Education-line collection can be summarised as being:

To provide widely available on-line access to electronic documents that result from or support the work of Higher Education professionals whose fields of enquiry, practice or policy include education or training in the United Kingdom.

The purposes of the Education-line acquisition policy

This acquisition policy is written in pursuit of the general purpose of Education-line as summarised above. Its own more specific purposes are twofold:

To act as a guide to Education-line staff and officers in gathering and accepting documents for inclusion in the Education-line collection

To act as a helpful guide for readers, depositors and other bodies as to the range and characteristics of documents that might be found in, or submitted to, the Education-line collection.

In each of these uses the policy should be understood as an aid to judgement, not a replacement for it. It is assumed that Education-line staff and officers, and Education-line users and depositors are professionally engaged in the education and training sectors and that this professional context can be taken as read in all statements that do not explicitly refer to it.

Where difficulties arise with a decision about inclusion, consultation between the Manager of the British Education Index, and an advisory group (or its constituent representatives) operating in support of Education-line would be desirable. A final decision would rest with the Manager of the British Education Index.

This written statement of the Education-line acquisition policy is an attempt to specify the principles that have come to underlie the two and a half years' collaborative work that has resulted in the collection that exists in the Spring of 1999. It is expected that an annual review would consider the extent to which circumstances or practice had changed sufficiently to warrant either the restatement or amendment of the policy.

Scope of collection

Documents are included where there is substantial reference or relevance to education and training in the United Kingdom. English is the required language.

Document types in Collection

A wide range of document types is accepted. The following list of examples is intended to encourage diversity rather than set limits:

Annotated bibliographies
Annual reports
Conference papers
Consultation papers
Consultation responses
Inquiry reports
Literature reviews
Methodological papers
Policy statements
Position statements
Practice guidelines
Programme reports
Research descriptions
Research reports
Scholarly pre-prints
Seminar papers
Speeches
Statements of opinion

Quality of Documents in Education-line

The documents presented by Education-line would normally be created by individuals or organisations with a professional standing in the fields of education or training. The public availability of the documents would reflect on those individuals and organisations and Education-line will not itself seek to impose quality criteria of its own. The descriptive record created by Education-line will include a statement about the document type and authors are invited to attach such disclaimers to their documents as they deem to be appropriate. An on-line form enables fellow professionals to submit comments that will be linked to any particular document. Acceptance of the comments for inclusion will be at the discretion of the Education-line database manager. The guiding principles and final responsibility for the inclusion of comments will be the same as those for documents in general.

Characteristics of documents that would normally be included

Documents are likely to be generated by, or be of lasting interest to, researchers, practitioners (primarily teachers and administrators) and policy makers in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. To the extent that Higher Education works in concert with other sectors of education and training, then documents from these sectors will also be included in the Education-line collection.

• Documents are indexed individually and should have sufficient coherence and completeness to stand alone.
• Documents containing raw data would normally have sufficient commentary or analysis to ensure adequate coherence and completeness for the document as a whole.
• Documents included are original works whose copyright owners have given permission for Education-line to present their work on-line.

Characteristics of documents that would normally be excluded

• Documents whose primary purpose is to advertise events, organisations, courses or publications and which do not in themselves have content of lasting interest and value would not normally be included.
• Documents originating outside the United Kingdom that have no obvious connection with the interests of UK Higher Education or which would more properly be included in the originator's own national database are not being sought.
• Documents whose content might put Education-line at legal risk (for example through a libel action) will not be accepted. In uncertain cases, legal advice will be sought.
• Documents of a personal rather than professional nature will not normally be accepted.
• Administrative or policy papers that were specific to a single institution or programme and which had no obvious link with the wider or more lasting concerns of the education and training communities would not be included in the Education-line collection.
• Newsletters or other contemporaneous documents would not be included if their contents had no discernible longer term value.

Technical Requirements

The principal, searchable, content of Education-line documents is text. This text needs to be submitted in a form that can be readily loaded into a BRS database and be stored as "text only". Most Education-line documents are submitted as email attachments in Microsoft Word 6 format. Other commonly used formats are acceptable. Documents prepared for print publication in desktop publishing or portable document files cannot be accepted in those formats.

Figures, tables, images and other multimedia elements can be embedded in or linked to documents and regularly updated notes of guidance for contributors will specify the range of file types that can be accommodated. Such embedded elements are not themselves catalogued, and are not searchable through the Education-line search interface. The guidelines in operation at any time are those displayed at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/guide.htm