Convenient research and more full texts

The Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) is robustly pursuing its Open Access Policy by continuing to expand academic research services in the field of vocational education and training and VET research. BIBB has made a “VET Repository” available online with immediate effect. This enables the convenient exploration of all aspects of vocational education and training and vocational education and training research. Full texts may also be viewed in many cases.

The “VET Repository” is based on BIBB’s Vocational Education and Training Literature Database (LDBB), which contains over 62,000 references and more than 8,000 links to full texts that are available free of charge. It thus replaces the LDBB as the main instrument and place of storage for Open Access publications, although existing data records will be retained. Ongoing evaluation of specialist literature and analysis of the contents of such sources will be continued. “By offering Open Access to specialist academic research literature for all users, the ‘VET Repository’ will allow BIBB to make an important contribution to vocational education and training research,” stressed BIBB’s Director of Research Professor Hubert Ertl.

The search interface of the “VET Repository” is based on modern open source software which enables several data sources to be searched at the same time. The BIBB library, which contains over 85,000 media units, can be included in the search with just one click of the mouse. The BIBB library is the largest specialist academic research collection on the topic of vocational education and training in any German speaking country.

In future, particular attention will be paid to acquiring full texts for the “VET Repository” in order to increase the proportion of specialist publications that is directly available digitally. The first measure to this end was the digitalisation of BIBB’s specialist periodical “Vocational Training in Research and Practice—BWP” for the years 1972 to 1999. These volumes had not previously been available in full text form.

The “VET Repository” is available on the BIBB website at www.vet-repository.info.

Further information is provided in the article “VET Repository as a central storage location for Open Access publications relating to vocational education and Training”, which is included in the latest issue of BIBB’s specialist periodical “Vocational Training in Research and Practice—BWP”, 1/2019. This article is available for download free of charge at www.bibb.de/bwp-9643 (German only).

Point of contact: Christian Woll, e-mail: repository@bibb.de

Specimen copy requested if printed.