Australian Education Index & A+ Education Lance Deveson Library & Information Manager. Stuart Hughes Senior Librarian Indexing Services.

History ACER commenced in 1930 – grant from the Carnegie Foundation. Mission: Improve learning ACER now has over 300 staff in Australia, India, Dubai & London. Cunningham Library has 12 staff in 3 units – Dissemination, Technical Services and Indexing. Australian Education Index, AEI, – started indexing Australian educational research in Longstanding relationships with journals and publishers, with material provided free for indexing purposes

AEI History Database of items Content from 1919 – current ( 1919 theses ) –Focus: Australian content in Australian journals & Australian content in o/seas journals. –Index also contains: conference papers, book chapters, reports, theses, monographs etc – 1977 Print index only, ceased in Coverage in AEI database – mostly 1978 onwards with some earlier content. ACER has always employed dedicated Librarians : Tasks: identification, acquisition, selection, indexing, linking, quality checking, scanning. Initially AEI was part of the AUSTROM CD – a joint development CSIRO, RMIT, ASCIS & Ferntree Computer Co ’s Access some content for indexing now via direct feeds from Publishers. Have relationship with BEI & Proquest (formally Dialog & Datastar)

AEI & Informit ACER & Informit relationship – early 1990’s A+ Education –Number of Items: (all of AEI) –ACER started sending PDF’s to Informit, May an initial batch of 6402 PDFs. –%age of Full Text: 32.5%, steadily increasing, 20%, June –%age of F/text since 2000: 58% reasonably constant. –Full Text %age = Supplied PDFs (26996) + linked content ( ) –Still emphasis on Australian content. –Monthly data is delivered to Informit for production.

Content breakup by Doc. type

Issues Long Term Viability? –Due to resource constraints it is becoming harder to: Maintain indexing currency and times Maintain indexing coverage and comprehensiveness Develop and maintain the A+ full text component (e.g. new clearances, URL checking) Develop the AEI/A+ product into new areas Short Term Niceties? –Indexing New Zealand content – logical but unfunded –Increase in O/seas content? – (support ACER’s overseas offices) Questions?