About the Digital Collections

In 1929, under the distinguished leadership of Jean Piaget (director, 1929–1969), the IBE became the first intergovernmental organization in the field of education. The IBE joined UNESCO in 1969 as an international center of comparative education, where it continued to promote research in the area of comparative education and maintain educational documentation and information services.

Guided by the vision of a world where every person has access to relevant, quality education and lifelong learning, the IBE provides support and promotes innovative solutions to the challenges faced by ministries of education and governments in the complex task of improving equity, quality, relevance, and effectiveness of curriculum, teaching, learning, and assessment processes and outcomes.

From the beginning, one of the IBE’s main activities has been the collection and diffusion of information. Its library, the Documentation Center, was initiated when the IBE began transferring educational journals to the former library of the League of Nations in the late 1930s.

After 1969, the IBE maintained and further expanded its educational documentation and information services. Today, resources collected at the Documentation Center are part of the IBE’s knowledge base on curricula and educational systems. This comprehensive set of specialized resources is at the service of capacity development and decision-making for quality education for all.

Realizing the utter importance of the Documentation Center archives, the IBE began digitization of the collection in 2016, with the intention of offering researchers, historians of education, specialists on education, and the wider international education community easy access to the IBE archives, and of preserving these unique documents for future generations.

Since that time, the project has managed to place the development of digital archives and a digital library at the core of the Documentation Center’s activities.