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ERIC: Mission, structure, and resources

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Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the mission, structure, and resource base of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). An extensive review of literature coupled with the conduct of a key informants survey is used to produce an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these aspects of ERIC. It is followed by recommendations for possible avenues for change and approaches to further investigation.

Introduction

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is a federally funded, nationwide information network designed to provide ready access to education literature. Its database contains nearly a million bibliographic records of journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, and books. The system consists of 16 subject-specific Clearinghouses, 13 adjunct Clearinghouses, and additional supportive components.

Since its creation in 1965, ERIC’s mission gradually expanded to include greater service mandates and growing audiences, its structure became more complex, yet its financial resources remain essentially level. Further, while its basic internal organizational structure has changed very little, it has expanded and ERIC has been repeatedly relocated within the federal government structure. Its present, new parent agency, the National Library of Education, has evolved entirely separately from the ERIC system, and thus it is unrealistic to expect that the nominal placement of ERIC within NLE has been sufficient to integrate the divergent traditions and organizational structures of these two entities. ERIC is currently surrounded by widespread changes in the culture and economics of information, driven by the popularity and apparent usability of the Internet and the World Wide Web. It is naı̈ve to expect that ERIC need do nothing to modify its mission, structure, and resources to adapt to the sweeping changes in its external environment.

Though ERIC has repeatedly demonstrated strong ties and effective service delivery to faculty and researchers in the higher education community, and has articulated a wide range of other potential audiences, it has nonetheless been criticized for its chronic inability to effectively address what many see as its core audience, that is, educational practitioners in the elementary, middle and secondary schools of this nation. The reasons for limited effectiveness in reaching this audience undoubtedly include a combination of: the location of the Clearinghouses in predominately higher education or other research organizations, thus leading to academically oriented resource collections; the lack of sufficient funding in light of expanding resource availability; multiple formats and access modalities; the generally nonresearch orientation of educational practitioners; and the fact that the expanding mission and steady state of fiscal resources make it increasingly difficult to develop sufficient products to serve specific target audiences.

This paper is based on an extensive literature review coupled with a key informants survey that was distributed to administrative personnel of each major ERIC component, including ERIC Clearinghouse Directors, Adjunct Clearinghouse Directors, Support Component Directors, and OERI Monitors, in order to develop a preliminary sense of effective practices and problem elements, as well as institutional knowledge and attitudes. This survey received responses from 20 out of the 39 ERIC personnel invited to participate. While mission, structure, and resources are inherently interconnected, this paper separates them for the purpose of identifying underlying issues of incompatibility and sources of difficulty.

Section snippets

Mission

The Educational Research (now Resources) Information Center (ERIC) system arose as a result of the need to catalog and archive the documents created by significant federal funding of a broad array of education-related activities beginning in the early 1960s. Ranging from research to exemplary programs and demonstration projects, the documents resulting from these activities lacked systematic procedures for publication, dissemination, and storage (Heinmiller, 1981). Consequently, there were

Structure

ERIC’s current structure (see Fig. 1 ), composed of a central coordinating federal office, support components charged with specific outputs, and widely dispersed Clearinghouse components valued for specialized knowledge and established audience relationships, is intentionally decentralized.

Organizational decentralization is based on the pluralistic and decentralized nature of U.S. education efforts, the desire to capitalize on the subject expertise of research centers throughout the country,

Products

ERIC’s main product is its bibliographic database. The database has since been distributed in print, through commercial database vendors, in CD-ROM format, and, most recently, online for free. This last dissemination method, in particular, has eroded the original distinction between the ERIC database as a predominantly digital information system with a separate text-based dissemination system, since web-based dissemination of the ERIC database gives users direct, searchable access to

Conclusions

There is a lack of political and institutional agreement as to the appropriate scope of the audience for ERIC. Widely divergent needs of those who reasonably understand themselves to be targeted ERIC clients result in a broad array of ERIC access points and products and result in increased outreach at no cost to the Federal government. These developments have been created out of necessity rather than systematic planning and are leading to fragmentation in the system, frustrations for creators

Acknowledgements

Graduate Research Assistants Beth Deeb, Diana Hagen, Rusty Palmer and Dan Phelps made significant contributions to the important tasks of identifying, locating, and bringing to my attention the appropriate resources for this paper. Bruce Fraser was most helpful in coordinating workflow and providing perspective on issues identified. Most especially, Tatia Markland worked with great skill and appropriate humor on the drafting of sections and the redrafting of sections and the redrafting of

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