ERIC Alert! US ED Proposes Eliminating ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education and Other Valuable ERIC Resources and Services

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) currently includes a network of 16 Clearinghouses, one of which is the ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education. The U.S. Department of Education has released for public comment a draft statement of work (SOW) for a "New ERIC" system. Unless this plan is modified, all 16 Clearinghouses and their services will be eliminated and there will be a dramatic change in the content of the ERIC database. The public has an opportunity to comment on the SOW until Friday, May 9, 2003.

The plan for the "New ERIC" makes the following changes:
* Closes all 16 ERIC Clearinghouses
* Eliminates personalized reference and referral services
* Shuts down Clearinghouse web sites-such as the ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education's site at http://www.ericsp.org/
* Reduces coverage of the journal literature from 1100 journals to an estimated 400
* Terminates AskERIC and clearinghouse question-answering services
* Eliminates ERIC Digests, books, and other synthesis publications
* Ends all networking and outreach activities
* Restricts consumer access to information, limiting ERIC database coverage to "approved lists" of journals and document contributors

What You Can Do:
* Read the U.S. Department of Education's draft Statement of Work for ERIC at http://www.eps.gov/spg/ED/OCFO/CPO/Reference%2DNumber%2DERIC2003/listing.html

* Contact your Congressional representatives--contact information can be found at Project Vote Smart (http://www.vote-smart.org/)

* Contact Secretary of Education Rod Paige via fax at 202-401-0596 (on letterhead, please) or email at Rod.Paige@ed.gov

* Submit your comments on the draft Statement of Work to Jeff Halstead, U.S. Department of Education Contract Specialist, via fax at 202-708-9817 (on letterhead, please) or email at Jeff.C.Halsted@ed.gov

* Keep on top of this issue at the following websites at ERIC Reauthorization News (http://www.lib.msu.edu/corby/education/doe.htm) or SaveERIC.org (http://www.saveeric.org/)

The Good News
It's not all bad news. A number of improvements have been incorporated into the draft ERIC Statement of Work. These include:
1. More rigorous selection criteria for materials added to the ERIC database.
2. Greater speed in building the database.
3. Centralized processing of materials for the database.
4. Better coding of content for better searching of the database and web site.
5. Free full-text copies of many materials.

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

1. Eliminates all 16 ERIC Clearinghouses including the ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education. This Clearinghouse provides information on teaching practice, teacher education, professional development, resources on how to pursue a teacher career, and also includes resources in the topic area of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (HPERD). There is no indication in the draft statement of work that the scope area of HPERD will be retained in the new ERIC system. The closing of all 16 Clearinghouses will eliminate the long-lasting partnerships that ERIC has developed with rich discourse communities of teacher educators, researchers, practitioners, and parents. Under the proposed new Statement of Work, ERIC becomes an impersonal, automated database. The system of distributed content knowledge experts currently embodied in the 16 different subject-specific Clearinghouses will be lost.

2. 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 1,100 journals to fewer than 400. Under this new system, it is likely that certain key journals in the fields of teaching, teacher education and health, physical education, recreation and dance will no longer be reviewed for inclusion in the database.

3. Eliminates personalized user services. The ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education has staff dedicated to providing users with personalized technical assistance and reference and referral services. Many ERIC customers need direct contact with subject-area specialists who can help them find resources and obtain information or clarification before searching the database. Some users lack ready access to a computer or the skills required to navigate the database and require personal technical assistance. But the draft SOW eliminates these personalized services:

* Clearinghouse information services, including AskERIC-these services respond to nearly 100,000 questions each year.
* Networking and outreach activities, including workshops and exhibits.
* Reference and referral services.

4. Limits customer access to web-based services and information. The new ERIC system would eliminate the web site of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Teaching and Teacher Education (http://www.ericsp.org/), including its resources for teachers, information on teacher education, links to state licensure and certification requirements, full-text publications, and resources for Health Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance. 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 web sites 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.

5. Restricts consumer access to information. ERIC was originally established as a repository for "fugitive education literature" such as conference papers, speeches, policy statements, etc. There is no place for this function in the proposed system. The draft 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 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.

6. Eliminates the ERIC synthesis function. ERIC Digests and major publications provide information in a format and language that makes this information more accessible to parents and teachers, for whom highly technical or scholarly writing is not always appropriate. Under the new ERIC system, publication including digests, monographs, books, information cards and bookmarks would no longer be produced.

Educators Protest Government Plan to Alter Popular Research Database (SanFrancisco Chronicle/Associated Press, May 27)

Academics are worried that the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database covering virtually every topic in the field of education could become much tougher to use under a Bush administration effort to restructure it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/05/27/nationa l0133EDT0413.DTL

If you are concerned about losing ERIC, here is the website that tells who to FAX (the preferred political contact medium) for each of the ERIC Clearinghouses that will be closed next year.

http://www.lib.msu.edu/corby/education/eric/clearinghouse.htm