Fachinformationsdienst Erziehungswissenschaft und Bildungsforschung (FID) is a specialist information service for education science and educational research that enables researchers to order specific international specialist literature that is not available via interlibrary loan in Germany. The service delivers publications as direct loans. It is also possible to recommend journals to be purchased. The partners for the direct loans are the libraries at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Two of the project partners, the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF) and the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg-Eckert-Institut (GEI), offer a unique service: if you need printed sources or historical textbooks available in these libraries that are not copyright protected, you can have them digitalised free of charge. FID also purchases source literature in the field of educational history and non-European textbooks.
The University Library Erlangen-Nürnberg (UB) has been a partner of FID, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), since January 2015. A consortium of academic libraries and specialist information services – the Information Center for Education (IZB) in Frankfurt am Main and the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF) in Berlin, both part of the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education (DIPF); the University Library at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | GEI | Georg-Eckert-Instit (GEI) in Braunschweig and the University Library at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin – is restructuring the provision of information and literature relevant for research in education science and educational research in close collaboration with experts in these fields. In doing so, FID makes an important contribution to providing academic information for researchers all over Germany.
The overarching goal of the FID’s further development is to support transparent research with traceable processes and openly accessible results—under the umbrella concept of Open Science—for the fields of educational research, educational science, and subject-specific didactics. The planned steps in detail:
The FID aims to provide better search options through knowledge graph technology, which establishes semantic links between pieces of information. To this end, it offers interfaces of varying complexity to support users with different skill levels when beginning their search. These interfaces allow a wide variety of digital resources, both within and outside the education portal, to be searched and displayed in different ways. This makes research resources visible in their diverse contexts.
Thanks to the integration of the ORCID personal identifier, researchers will be able to more clearly identify the authorship of their own publications in the future. In the spirit of open science, the FID is responding to the need for exchange and collaborative document creation by setting up a dedicated communication platform.
The FID continues to promote open access to scientific literature by providing organizational support for the crowdfunding of open access publications. In cooperation with the open-access repository peDOCS, up to 20 monographs are published each year. The service will also be expanded to include journals. Financial support is provided by the project “edu consort oa,” which is funded by the BMFTR.
The FID supplements the services offered by local academic libraries by providing researchers nationwide with literature and other research-related resources. On the website www.fachinformationsdienst-bildungsforschung.de, researchers with specific information needs can order international specialized literature unavailable through interlibrary loan within Germany. The service delivers the publications as direct loans. Journal titles can also be suggested for purchase. Humboldt Universität in Berlin and Friedrich-Alexander Universität in Erlangen-Nürnberg are partners for direct loans.
National licenses for journals and databases, negotiated by the FID, provide direct access to digital resources. Copyright-free works from the relevant library collections are digitized on request for educational history research and educational media research.
As an additional service for research and teaching, the FID will improve access to digital educational media. Within the framework of a clearinghouse, licensing models are being developed so that these media can be offered in academic libraries in cooperation with educational media publishers.