provides leadership in developing effective media and information services activities for OERI.

From the library's beginning in the nineteenth century, the early U.S. Commissioners of Education had explicitly aimed at creating something more than an in-house library for agency staff--they had sought to create a depository of education works for the benefit of scholars and educators from around the country. To some extent, the education library has performed this function, though it has not achieved the comprehensiveness in the field of education that the national libraries of agriculture and medicine have attained in their respective fields.

The 1998 Reauthorization of the Higher Education Programs (signed October 7, 1998) established a Performance Based Organization to administer the Student Financial Assistance Programs at the U.S. Department of Education. This Web page will keep you abreast of the changes to our organization, and our progress in reinventing these important programs, which provide over $42 billion of financial aid a year to college students.