Proposed changes to ERIC Clearinghouses.

The U.S. Department of Education has issued a draft Scope of Work (SOW) for a NEW ERIC system. Unless the draft SOW is modified, all 16 Clearinghouses and their services (including AskERIC, Publications, and Digests) will be eliminated.

What the ERIC Board of Directors Have To Say:

"The Good News. It's not all bad news. A number of improvements long advocated by the ERIC Clearinghouses have been incorporated into the draft ERIC Scope of Work. These include:

1. More rigorous selection criteria for materials added to the database.

2. Greater speed in building the database.

3. Centralized processing of materials for the database.

4. Use of XML for greater interoperability.

5. Free full text copies of many materials.

6. Better metatagging of content for easier searching.

7. Centralizing administrative functions for greater efficiency

The Bad News. Unfortunately, however, many of the proposed changes eliminate or damage services essential to educators and the general public. The draft SOW:

1. Eliminates all 16 ERIC Clearinghouses. The closing of the clearinghouses will eliminate the long-lasting partnerships ERIC Clearinghouses have developed with rich discourse communities of researchers, practitioners, and parents. Under the proposed new Scope of Work, ERIC becomes an impersonal, auto mated database.

2. Eliminates personalized services. Many ERIC customers need direct contact with a content specialist who can help them obtain information or clarification before searching the database. Others lack ready access to a computer or the skills required to navigate the database. But the draft SOW eliminates these services:

a. AskERIC and clearinghouse information services--these services respond to nearly 100,000 questions each year.

b. Digests, books, and other publications.

c. Clearinghouse Web sites.

d. Networking and outreach activities.

e. ERIC-sponsored Listservs.

f. Referral services.

1. Reduces coverage of journal literature. The interdisciplinary nature of the ERIC database would suffer because the number of journals likely to be covered would be reduced from approximately 1100 journals to fewer than 400.

2. Eliminates the ERIC synthesis function. ERIC Digests and major publications increase the access of parents and many classroom teachers to material that is highly technical or scholarly, and not useful to a non-technical audience in its original form.

3. Restricts consumer access to information. The SOW specifies the development of "approved lists" of journals and document contributors. This strategy increases the possibility that bias can be introduced into database selection procedures. The draft SOW also calls for limiting database inclusion to only those items "directly related" to education. Education priorities change. If ERIC focuses its collection effort narrowly, or only on certain priorities, it may miss choosing documents and journal articles that provide a balanced view of current issues, or a longitudinal view of education trends. Research on information dissemination supports the current practice of reflecting a broad range of practices and views in the database. The ERIC database is essentially an archive or library that serves best by including contributions on a wide variety of topics and points of view.

4. Limits customer access to Web-based services and information. ERIC Clearinghouse-sponsored Web sites are heavily used. Collectively, these Web sites received 688 million Web accesses and more than 22.5 million unique visitors in 2002. Clearinghouse Web statistics suggest that ERIC users come to the clearinghouse Websites for many purposes other than searching the ERIC database. For example, in 2002, ERIC Digests were accessed more than 3.6 million times on Clearinghouse Web sites. Customers also use other full-text materials on these Web sites, FAQs, conference calendars, links, financial and scholarship information, and directories."