Collections Policy

1.0 IESR Aims

The Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) is a catalogue of collection-level descriptions of electronic resources that benefit the UK academic community. IESR supports teaching, learning and research by providing an academic ‘Yellow Pages’ enabling discovery, access to, sharing and re-use of resources. It aims to provide a single, definitive source of information about digital resources by covering all significant research collections in the UK. By aggregating existing resources IESR provides a one-stop shop for discovering information about the full range of resources applicable to a UK academic audience.

We develop this catalogue by a combination of manually created entries and by harvesting descriptive metadata using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).

2.0 User Community

IESR supports teaching, learning and research within the UK academic community providing a freely available service. In reflecting the full range of UK content IESR includes a mixture of both freely available and restricted access materials requiring registration and/or a subscription. Two significant types of users include those wishing to discover and use content.

2.1 Users wishing to discover content

IESR aggregates, organises and disseminates descriptive information about resources to facilitate discovery, access and re-use. Key users are information specialists, e-learning specialists and portal developers.

2.2 Users wishing to contribute content

The IESR user community includes creators and developers of content applicable to an academic audience. Collections owners contribute descriptions of their resources to make them discoverable within IESR. Key contributors are JISC funded, licensed and negotiated services, content developers and providers in HE and FE and commercial publishers.

3.0 Collection Scope

3.1 Subjects

IESR collections are intended to support teaching, learning and research within the UK academic community. Consequently subject coverage is wide ranging and multi-disciplinary. Collections are not limited by either timescale or spatial coverage.

3.2 Geographical focus

The IESR aims to represent all collections developed within HE and FE institutions and to promote those collections nationally. It also aims to support teaching, learning and research within the UK academic community. Consequently IESR has a focus on UK collections but includes content from around the world.

3.3 Language

The majority of collections described in IESR are in English, but resources in other languages may also be included if they support the UK academic community.

3.4 Types of materials

Resource types are wide ranging and include:

• Databases and datasets
• Audio/visual resources such as image collections, animations and interactive resources
• Bibliographic resources
• Learning materials such as collections of e-learning objects
• Books and journals in electronic format
• Open access repositories
• Research publications

3.5 Sources of content

IESR sources of content include:

1. JISC funded, licensed and negotiated content. It is a specific priority of lESR to reflect and promote JISC funded content and services such as those provided by Mimas and EDINA and content licensed by JISC Collections.
2. HE and FE focused collections created and developed by academic institutions and funded by those institutions, or as part of grant funded projects.
3. HE and FE focused collections created and developed by commercial organisations.

4.0 Cataloguing support

Cataloguing support is available in-house for contributors lacking resources to create collection descriptions. Please contact jo.lambert@manchester.ac.uk for further information about this service.