About DEFF
DEFF aims to make sure that scholars, educators and students have access to all relevant information via user-friendly systems and guidance of excellent quality. The aim is to support all aspects of the scholars’ and students’ work with information resources at the highest international level. DEFF contributes to the optimal exploitation of research-based information resources and this happens through cooperation between the library partners, common development projects as well as the establishing of a technical infrastructure.
DEFF’s target group is mainly serviced directly via the institutions that participate in DEFF, and through common services where this is expedient.
DEFF has three overall goals. Firstly, DEFF must improve the end-users’ exploitation of electronic resources, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Secondly, the cooperation between the research libraries must be strengthened and made to include new cooperation partners. Finally, the results must be documented, mediated and spread to the public.
DEFF is a cooperation organisation for Danish educational and research libraries. The cooperation includes joint development in those cases where cooperation yields better results than the sum of local initiatives. This guarantees a better collective exploitation of the libraries’ resources. DEFF must also ensure further development of the common network of information resources, and there must also be a collective mediation of the information resources of the educational and research libraries to the public.
Participants
The DEFF cooperation includes the majority of the about 500 libraries that service scholars and students:
- The university libraries, e.g. Aalborg University Library
- Other specialist and research libraries – libraries that service institutions with specific research or analysis tasks, e.g. the Danish Road Directorate Library as well as a number of libraries in connection with private companies
- Libraries at the university colleges – libraries at medium-length education programmes, e.g. teacher training and pedagogue training
- Upper secondary educations, e.g. gymnasiums, SOSU educations (social and health colleges), business and technical colleges.
Target group
DEFF’s primary target group is scholars, educators and students at educational institutions with medium-length and further educations and at sector-research institutions. The target group is characterised by having need of DEFF’s information resources at e.g. research-based commercial companies and research parks, hospitals and institutions with shorter education programmes. Apart from that DEFF contributes to the mediation to the public of the information resources of the educational and research libraries.
Theme: Research and education
In a knowledge society research and educational institutions play an important role as producers of knowledge and competences. Despite the increasing impact of the Internet, both as medium and source of information, both research and education continue to be very dependent of libraries in order to function.
The notion that the Internet as information source is sufficient to conduct research and education involves the risk of the library’s importance to research and education being underestimated.
Research is cumulative – it is all-important to build on existing research results. This presupposes that one can indentify the latest research results, that one can trust them and can gain access to them. This is where the libraries play an essential role. The libraries also play an increasingly greater role in terms of the output from the research processes where activities like research registration and Open Access are by now central tasks for many libraries.
Education is becoming ever more problem and project oriented. The students learn to formulate the questions themselves and answer them via project work. The learning moves out of the classroom and in many cases into the library in learning spaces and reading rooms. Teaching materials must be available via the Internet, and the Internet itself becomes an important tool in the learning process. Apart from handling digital education materials the libraries must also via training in information literacy contribute to making sure that the students can use the Internet critically and efficiently and in this way lay the foundations for lifelong learning.
The libraries that support higher education and research are called educational, specialist and research libraries.
Publication may be found at the address http://www.bibliotekogmedier.dk/fileadmin/publikationer/publikationer_engelske/deff/profile/index.htm