The project's initial goal was to develop a search engine that would provide users access to the university's research resources.

Yet as the initiative advanced, the creators came to see the need for a more thorough search engine that might provide users access to academic resources outside of the university.

The search engine was created to index and offer access to scholarly materials such journals, institutional repositories, and digital collections as well as scientific publications.

In 2007, the project received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to further develop and improve the search engine.

Bibliographic data is provided in several formats, and the results may be sorted by multiple fields, such as by author or year of publication.

BASE becomes an increasingly important component of open access initiatives concerned with enhancing the visibility of their digital archive collections.