The ERO Base (European Research Overview DataBase) is envisaged as a major pool of information on vocational education and training (VET) and human resource development (HRD) research. It is designed as an on-line searchable database accessible to European Training Village (ETV) members. The ERO Base is developed to provide up-to-date information about the VET and HRD research. Procedures for storing and retrieving the resources are intended to be as simple and quick as possible to make the ERO Base a useful tool of mutual collaboration in the VET and HRD research community. The Research Area of Cedefop moderates the database in a close co-operation with national administrators, who are members of national ReferNet consortia and are responsible for a professional level of inputs into the ERO Base. However, all users are welcomed to contribute to the ERO Base. The specific templates in each section guide them in inserting the data. The data, which are sent by users, are checked and they are inserted in the database after completing them in Cupertino with their providers.

This extraordinary potentiality of the on-line database opens space for a broad publicity and dissemination of such research results, which are produced usually in a framework of different projects and stay unpublished to the end of the project. Unfortunately, lot of interesting results is known very late by this way and some of them stay unpublished from different reasons (mainly financial). Similar possibility suggests itself for publishing numerous papers presented at conferences and meetings, which should be unpublished because of preparing of their proceedings is time consuming and expensive.

The ERO Base was developed in agreement with principles given by the Code of Good Practice for Current Research Information. It is divided into three interrelated sections:

• the Directory of Experts
• the Paper Base
• the Project Base

The sections are connected with a Cedefop database of VET Institutions in Europe (VET-Institute). The structure enable to keep a broad scale of information, which are accessible through user-friendly interfaces and up-to-date collected records without their full rewriting. The presentation deals with the development of the ERO Base and its functionality as well as with our first experience from its service to all those who are interested in up-to-date information from VET and HRD research.