GLOTREC development phase 2020–2022
The GEI has developed GLOTREC to be a unique information infrastructure for global research that studies or uses educational media. At its heart are multi-lingual, digital research services that are continually being expanded and which will ultimately combine both the content and functionality of existing digital services offered by the GEI – such as the Curricula Workstation (CW), GEI-Digital and the International TextbookCat (ITBC). The research services offered through GLOTREC|Cat currently provide access, from any location, to over 280,000 examples of educational media for schools as well as freely accessible digitised material and full-texts from collections located around the globe.
Within the framework of GLOTREC, the unique collections held by the research library are also being digitised in stages and secured for posterity as cultural heritage. The GLOTREC|Cat enables access to those GEI collections that have already been digitised and also provides open access to current digital educational media in compliance with the relevant property rights. Digitised, licence-free educational media held by our international GLOTREC partners are also being integrated into the service and made available. This will create an extensive, freely accessible digital library, offering high-quality, international data sets. Such source material is valuable for the (digital) humanities and cultural sciences, for social and information studies as well as information technology and computer linguistics.
Partners
- Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros
Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (UEPG)
Ponta Grossa (Brazil) - Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo
São Paulo (Brazil) - Museo de la Educación Gabriela Mistral
Santiago de Chile (Chile) - Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell’Educazione, Università degli Studi di Torino
Torino (Italy) - Groupo of Historical Research in Education and National Identity (GIHEIN)
at Universidad del Atlántico, Baranquilla (Colombia) - Instituto de Historia de Cuba
Havanna (Cuba) - Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV)
at Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México (Mexico) - Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)
Madrid (Spain) - Centro de Investigación Manuales Escolares (MANES)
Madrid (Spain)
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Objectives
To integrate textbook and educational media collections available around the world
A digital, and consequently non-localised, multi-lingual catalogue that homogenises the diverse (meta) data from various libraries and brings together widely dispersed collections of analogue and digital educational media to form a standardised and expandable reference system. The catalogue will provide a research instrument with which users can conduct multilingual searches tailored to the specific requirements of educational media research. Interfaces will provide access to digital tools enabling users to further process the data provided by the catalogue.
To protect cultural heritage and make resources available to researchers
The unique collections held by the research library at the GEI are being successively digitised and preserved for posterity as an important part of our cultural heritage. The GLOTREC catalogue will provide researchers with access to the digitised volumes and to current digital educational media, subject to copyright regulations. Digitised, licence-free educational media from our partners will also be integrated and made available. This will lead to the creation of a comprehensive digital library that will provide large amounts of high-quality, international and multilingual data as a unique source of material for the fields of (digital) humanities and cultural studies as well as for social and information sciences and information technology.
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Methodoloy
The Development of a Research-based Infrastructure
From 2022, humanities-based research projects of the international partner institutions accompany the development of the infrastructure. The academics will generate new research questions and innovative research designs based on GLOTREC’s comprehensive data and will apply their expertise to the research-based and user-oriented development of the GEI’s digital products.
Start-up phase 2020 to 2022
The core part of the start-up phase, which ran until 2022, was the construction of a technical infrastructure, which enables the digital products developed by the GEI to be targeted in future towards the dynamically evolving needs of educational media research. In addition, workflows were established for interdisciplinary and international collaborative work at the GEI and among the associated partners while further textbook collections from our international partners were successively processed and integrated into the catalogue.
Consolidation and permanent operation from 2023
From 2023, GLOTREC will be transferred to permanent operation as a core service of the GEI. The following offers and services of the GEI will be developed into an international, interoperable research tool during the construction phase:
International TextbookCat
The International TextbookCat is a research tool that enables researchers to search the textbook collections in new and more intuitive ways.
- browse the collections
- use search criteria designed specifically for textbook searches (including country or federal state, education level, subject, school type, etc.)
Curricula Workstation
The Curricula Workstation provides central access to German and international curricula, in both print and electronic formats. Accessible worldwide, it is a permanent resource for researchers of history, geography, social studies/politics, and ethics/religious education curricula.
GEI-Digital – The Digital Textbook Library
GEI-Digital provides free access to digitised historical textbooks from many collections. It also enables targeted full-text searches within existing digitised collections.
GEI-DZS – Database of Approved Textbooks
GEI-DZS - The Georg Eckert Institute’s database of approved textbooks for geography, history and social studies/politics in German state schools. The database contains textbooks from the 2009/10 academic year up to the present day.
