The British Education Index is compiled at the University of Leeds, England; and this disc is the searchable database of the printed version together with the content of the microfiche British Education Theses Index. It covers all the significant English language journal and thesis literature relating to all fields of education from pre‐school to higher and adult education. It has broad subject and geographical coverage and has become an accepted standard tool in this subject area. Topics such as cognitive development, computer‐assisted learning, curriculum, policy management in education, and all the expected subject areas concerned with direct and vocational education and training are also included.
The database is also available on a single CD‐ROM as International ERIC (Educational Resource Information). The price is $900 [£640] with four updates annually. This disc contains the British Education Index with the Australian Education Index and the Canadian Education Index and corresponding indexes of theses. However, each of these databases has to be loaded and searched separately. The current disc contains some 200,000 records and 4,000 are added quarterly.
The earlier items in the British Education Index (BEI) were provided by the British Library and there are noticeable changes in selection and choice of subject headings for more recent records. The controlling thesaurus has also been developed to improve vocabulary control. The single CD‐ROM will serve for some years to come and its obvious advantages over the printed version of BEI are its extreme compactness and its electronic searchability. The search tool lets the user search by choice of terms or phrases from a long list of subject‐headings and index terms. Alternatively personally‐chosen words or phrases may be entered on a screen form. There are additional helpful running indexes of authors, title‐words, journal names, dates, named persons and BEI subject‐headings.
With this wealth of choice users have to decide how best to approach a search. If reliably keeping up‐to‐date, or finding what important papers have been written on a particular topic is what is needed, then one can put one’s faith in the compilers and limit choice to the BEI index terms. If, however, the aim is to perform a comprehensive search on a complex or unclear topic, then a more tedious approach is necessary. This is through the major list of subject‐headings, following terms along every route which offers hits under alternative or related terms. This approach is necessary because, at different times, the subject‐headings list and its controlling thesaurus have been changed without going back over already‐indexed material to draw it into line.
By no means are all the papers accompanied by abstracts, although the proportion is to be increased in the future. Abstracts have been electronically scanned for index terms additional to those provided by the indexer. As in most searchable databases, selected terms are highlighted in the display of selected items. But the highlighting is so far muted that users may find it necessary to reset the colour display to become aware of the highlights. There are no other problems and the program may be used from the CD‐ROM under “Autorun”, or installed to the hard disk for improved operation. Records may be sorted, saved, downloaded, or printed out in any desired way. Networking versions are available at rates to be arranged according to needs of multiple users. This is an excellent tool for educational research workers and for following British trends in the educational field.
