The IESR has been developed to provide a registry of information about electronic resources that are of value to teachers, researchers and learners. The IESR project is part of JISC's Shared Services Programme.

The aim is to create a reliable source of information that other applications, such as portals, can freely access through machine-to-machine protocols, in order to help their end users discover resources of assistance to them.

The IESR contains information about the resources themselves, technical details about how to access the resources, and contact details for the resource providers. For resource providers the IESR will hold a master description of their electronic resources, to which other potential users of the resources may be directed.

Information about services and resources is held in a metadata format; data coming into the system must be translated into this format (some machine processes exist to do this). Data discovered from the system is made available in this format.

The dataset described above is essentially accessed by a number of different service interfaces; records can be added via a harvest process of external data sources (e.g. from an external resource provider), or via a data entry application.

Different interfaces then make the records within the registry available to other parties (e.g. via Z39.50, or Harvest). In addition the IESR also makes use of a search ‘robot’ process to check that search targets are available and responding to search requests. A human can be alerted when such search targets are unavailable.