Contractor Selected
A press release from the Department of Education, dated 3-18-2004, announces the selection of a contractor to develop the new version of ERIC. The recipient of the $34.6 million dollar contract is Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) of Rockville, Md.
Summary
As posted at the ERIC: Educational Resources Information Center website, in January 2004, the Department of Education will begin to implement a reengineering plan for ERIC. According to the website, the new ERIC mission will continue the core function of providing a centralized bibliographic database of journal articles and other published and unpublished education materials. The ERIC database will no longer be maintained by the sixteen ERIC Clearinghouses, which closed in December 2003, but by a private contractor. p>Currency of the ERIC Database
Beginning in January, no new materials will be received and accepted for the database. When the new model for acquiring education literature is ready later in 2004, the Department will communicate with publishers, education organizations, and other database contributors to add publications and materials released from January 2004 forward. However, some records for items from 2003 will continue to be added the ERIC database into the early months of 2004. Again, according to the government RFP for restructuring ERIC, there is no requirement that the database be updated between January 1, 2004 and September 30, 2004. The new contractor is, however, required to have citations for January through August 2004 available by September 30, 2004. After September 30, 2004, the updating is expected to be ongoing.
As a result, the ERIC database (including the EBSCO, CSA, and government sponsored versions) will fall behind in currency for a period of time. Please remember to use other related databases, such as the Professional Development Collection, during this time. The Library will continue to offer access to a commercial vendor version of ERIC (currently EBSCO and CSA) because the interface is superior to the free version and the commercial versions allow for crosslinking to full-text journals though either same-vendor products or the Penn*Text service.
ERIC Clearinghouses
ERIC Clearinghouses websites, including AskERIC, and their toll-free telephone numbers closed on December 19, 2003. For information on the fate of clearinghouse materials, please see ERIC Clearinghouses Make Plans for the Future.
ERIC ED Fiche collection
EDRS (ERIC Document Reproduction Service) is currently scheduled to close September 30, 2004. Up until that time, EDRS will continue to produce and ship microfiche subscriptions to libraries. These will continue to be received by and housed in the Van Pelt Library. Most of these documents will be available electronically through E*Subscribe via crosslinks within EBSCO ERIC and CSA ERIC. After September, only electronic versions of new items will be available and reportedly at no charge.
ERIC Reports Now Available in GPO Access
U.S. Government-funded reports from the ERIC program previously distributed to Federal Depository Libraries on microfiche are available at GPO Access at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eric/index.html as searchable PDF files, beginning with ED 463411. Not all reports in the ERIC program are eligible for distribution in the FDLP because they are not produced solely at government expense. The subset is approximately 10% of the total body of reports available from ERIC.
For more information:
Patty Lynn, Education Bibliographer/Library Liaison to GSE
