Ausbau und Optimierung der Dienstleistungen und der Informationsinfrastruktur der Forschungsbibliothek für die internationale Schulbuchforschung

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Simone Lässig
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 190323198

The research library operated by the Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) is continuing the work begun in the first phase of this project on improving access to its collection of textbooks and curricula. The library is extending its research and information services in response to the diversification and expansion which has been taking place in research into textbooks and information media; in this way, it will help fill current gaps in research in this area and consolidate and further enhance its status as an internationally respected centre for the multidisciplinary field of research into textbooks and other educational media. The project which is the subject of this application has three principal aims in this context: First, it will entail substantial work on the Curricula Workstation (CW), which was developed in the initial phase of the project and has recently gone live; the project team will undertake a considerable expansion of the geographical scope of the collection of curricula contained in the CW and the amount of material covered, and add to the collection retrospectively by indexing and digitising older corpora of curricula. Second, this phase of the project will supplement the Workstation with the addition of collaborative, interactive and personalisable functions and evolve it into a “CurricuLabor”. This work will address a need identified by the CW’s academic target group during evaluations which took place in the first phase of the project. The project team expects this process to generate valuable insights into how collaborative functions can best be incorporated into and used within research infrastructures, insights it anticipates will possess relevance and significance transcending the project at hand.The third aim of the project phase which this application concerns will be to optimise the research instrument developed in the project’s initial phase in line with user needs and the realities of research in the field. The foundations for this ongoing optimisation were put in place during the first phase of the project: the GEI library’s collection of textbooks from around the world has been made available to research in terms of its content and format and a classification system for textbooks has been drawn up and provided in German and English. Overall, the project aims to maximise the potential of the GEI’s research library as a centre for academic communication in its field and as a working environment for its target group, i.e. researchers engaged in the study of textbooks, curricula and other educational media.The project’s products will be: (1) a collection of curricula augmented by the addition of new curricula from within and outside Europe and made available to researchers in a form meeting the needs of academic work in the field; (2) the addition of collaborative and interactive functions to the CW; and (3) an optimised research tool for the GEI’s textbook collection, adapted in line with current technological developments.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)