Electronic business information for higher and further education: building the DNER

The UK higher and further education sector is engaged on a radical, world-leading project to create a vast menu of high quality electronic content covering all disciplinary areas and delivered via a seamless, standardized and integrated information infrastructure. This in turn will be supported by advisory, preservation and other services. The content includes commercial information products, but also resources created by higher and further education institutions themselves. The project is called the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and has been developed with substantial funding from UK higher education and further education’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The DNER is one of the foundation stones on which JISC’s view of the development of information, content and learning resources infrastructure for HE/FE in the next five years is built [1]. This article describes the evolving concept of the DNER and relates it to one disciplinary area, business and management studies.