By Ravi Natesh The world’s largest education database is being modernized and expanded to become the premier digital education library. The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), sponsored by the US Department of Education, was created in 1966 and is used by educators, students, parents, policymakers, journalists, and researchers around the globe. In 2004, the Department began working with CSC to upgrade the database and streamline the processes for adding and retrieving documents.

Going online before the Internet

By 1966, the US government had been funding educational studies for years. Unless these studies were published and widely distributed on paper, most education researchers and practitioners in the field did not even know they existed. These unpublished papers were dubbed “fugitive literature,” and ERIC was created to archive them and make them more accessible.

From 1966 until the reorganization in 2004, much of ERIC’s collection work was done by 16 university- and association-based clearinghouses and 10 adjunct clearinghouses. Each one specialized in a subject area, such as rural education and small schools; elementary and early childhood education; and science, mathematics, and environmental education.

The clearinghouses worked with hundreds of research centers, education associations, and publishers to identify, collect, and sometimes develop original content for ERIC. They were in charge of selecting high-quality materials, including journal articles as well as unpublished documents, and providing abstracts and indexing terms. For each article, book, or document selected, clearinghouse staff built a record containing the title, author, source, and an abstract. Those records were then sent to the ERIC Processing and Reference Facility, which was run by CSC, for compilation into the ERIC database.

When ERIC began, nearly all research, published or not, was on paper. To make this research more widely available, the ERIC facility sent print copies of material gathered by the ERIC Clearinghouses to the document delivery component of ERIC, EDRS, which scanned the full text and put it on microfiche — the state-of-the-art medium of the time. ERIC then distributed these microforms to subscribing institutions, primarily academic libraries and research centers, for a fee. By 2003, ERIC subscribers collectively stored enough duplicate microfiche to nearly encircle the globe. Individuals could also order paper copies of selected documents from EDRS.

Early in its history, ERIC took advantage of even more advanced technology. The ERIC bibliographic database went online at a time when the Internet was still a Pentagon experiment, as File 1 in the pioneer online database, Dialog.

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