Welcome to the new Eldis!
If you are a regular user of Eldis you will notice some quite big changes to both the appearance of the website and how things are organised.
For the last few months we’ve been working hard on what is the biggest update to our services in over 10 years. These changes reflect not just some long-awaited improvements to the website itself but also an important shift in how the Eldis team here at IDS will deliver on our mission to increase the accessibility of useful and relevant research on global development challenges.
Visit our contribute page to find out how you can help.
Among the main changes you will see are:
Improved search
The very large volume of research summaries now available on Eldis means that it hasn’t always been easy to find the most relevant documents. This has been a consistent theme of feedback we’ve received from you in recent years and improving the site specific search was one of the main recommendations of a recent evaluation of DFID-funded portals.
The new Eldis search is more powerful and includes some advanced filtering options that make it much easier to find the content you need. We have also integrated the search into our thematic coverage of development topics to simplify the structure of the site and make it easier to navigate your way around.
Phone and tablet friendly
The recent independent evaluation also made it clear how important being able to access Eldis from mobile devices has become for our users. With this in mind, we have implemented a new responsive page layout which makes it much easier to use Eldis on smaller screens.
We have also taken the opportunity to freshen up the look and feel of the site, making more use of images, taking steps to try to minimise page-loading times so that this new design doesn’t slow down access to the site even when you don’t have access to a reliable and fast internet connection.
Focus on Key Issues
At Eldis we’ve always tried not just to make research documents available, but to organise and synthesise that research to make it more accessible for the user. As part of this, for many years, we’ve offered Key Issues Guides as a way of introducing key development issues and directing users to the must-read research on those topics.
As part of our redesign we’ve made Key Issues Guides a much more prominent part of our service. The new Guides utilise combinations of text, images, video and audio to create an engaging story that guides readers through an issue. They are an excellent way for research projects and programmes to not just increase awareness of your work but also to stimulate direct engagement with your research findings.
If you would be interested in working on a Key Issues Guide with us please get in touch for more information.
Since 2013 Eldis has received no core funding from donors and so we rely on the income generated through products like Key Issues Guides, our contribution to projects such as the Open Knowledge Hub and working with strategic knowledge partners like CDKN to be able to keep our content freely available to all under open access licenses.
Please visit our contribute page, or get in touch, to find out how you can help support our work on equitable knowledge sharing for global development. As always we welcome feedback on the site and your suggestions for how we can do things better.
Photo credit: Favéla Santa Marta, Painting of life in the favéla | dany13 | Flickr | CC BY 2.0