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Press release
The Portal is a new online database, bringing together research and information on the voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors.
The portal will help voluntary organisations, government departments, academics and others to access evidence on a broad range of topics related to the sector. A unique ‘third sector’ thesaurus has been designed to help people identify the most appropriate material to inform their work.
The portal has been created by TSRC in partnership with the British Library. It is funded by the Big Lottery Fund.
What’s in the portal?
The Portal aims to include material on every aspect of the sector, including areas such as commissioning, social and economic impact, equality, political analysis, social enterprise and much more.
Content will be drawn from a broad range of sources, including:
- Academic research collections;
- reports and research produced within the sector nationally, locally and internationally;
- government publications and consultations;
- abstracts for books and journal articles;
- guidance and training materials.
How will access be provided?
Wherever possible the Portal will provide fully downloadable content in PDF or other standard formats, hosted on our own secure server.
It will also guide users to additional content in the British Library’s collections, articles in respected online journals, and useful documents from other online sources. Where electronic copies are not freely available, the portal will provide direct links to the British Library catalogue. These can be used to request inter-library loans or to order printed copies of journal articles from the BL Document Supply Centre.
Adding new material
The Portal is constantly expanding and will regularly add up-to-date and topical material.
We want to make this resource as comprehensive as possible, so please let us know if you publish relevant material for inclusion. The Portal can help to maintain collections that are at risk due to funding cuts, and enable your research to reach a larger audience. We are also interested in pointing to other resources, such as charity and foundation archives, of use to the research community.
Governance
Development of the portal is advised by the Knowledge Portal Management Committee (KPMC), made up of partners and users from the sector, academia and policy. See Terms of Reference.
For more information, contact:
Peter Lambert
Knowledge Portal Manager, Third Sector Research Centre
E: p.lambert@tsrc.ac.uk
T: 0121 414 3012
Follow @3rdsectorportal on twitter