May 8, 2003
Honorable Rod Paige
Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education
Washington, DC
Dear Mr. Secretary,
We are pleased to have this opportunity to comment on the ERIC Draft Statement of Work. Planned changes in the ERIC system have raised concerns for us as members of the Education Division of the Special Libraries Association.
We commend the Department of Education for this review of the ERIC system and many of the proposals that will enhance the database, such as currency, full-text, and electronic paper submission.
One of the most valuable services offered by ERIC has been the AskERIC service and the availability of subject experts at each of the Clearinghouses to respond to a variety of education-related questions. These individuals are not only intimately familiar with the database and how to search it most efficiently, but they also refer users to important associations, organizations, and related web-based resources that provide information beyond the scope of the ERIC database. Even in an increasingly technological society, we know that not everyone is computer literate, and the elimination of a personalized question-answering service will be extremely detrimental to a large group of users, including the economically and educationally disadvantaged.
The Department seems to be trying to replace the ERIC Clearinghouses with a centralized clearinghouse, the What Works Clearinghouse that will be a dissemination center for information about educational research. It will evaluate completed research on seven or eight subject areas each year and make these completed "Evidence Reports" available to the public on the Web. The government's decision to emphasize evaluation of practice information for teachers and administrators should not come at the cost of their most successful outreach program, the ERIC Clearinghouse system. The teachers and administrators do need the work of the Clearinghouse for synthesis and analysis of topics.
We regret the loss of the link to the ERIC Digests, produced by the Clearinghouses, which were formerly on the Department of Education Web page.
We are concerned that the proposed producer-provided and automatic indexing will reduce the value of ERIC significantly by diminishing the quality and consistency of the abstracting and indexing of database entries. The consistency and specificity of the current ERIC indexing protocols are invaluable both to researchers and to less knowledgeable users who tend to use very specific search terms. Effective indexing is a skill that cannot be taught quickly, nor are authors likely to have the objective distance from their subject necessary for the task. The ERIC Thesaurus remains an invaluable tool for accessing information in ERIC. Consistency in indexing is critical to preserving the functionality of the system; major revisions to current indexing practices could lead to a great loss in the effectiveness of database search retrieval.
The move to comprehensive indexing of selected journals is another aspect of the proposal that concerns us. The broad reach of the current database brings in education related items from other disciplines. If coverage is limited to selected education journals and this article-by-article selection of items is lost, the database will be far less valuable for researchers. The Department of Education has made service to practitioners a priority, but it would be counterproductive to limit research for the education community by selective journal coverage.
Please reconsider this proposal and retain the current services offered by the ERIC system, while improving upon the technological delivery and currency of the ERIC contents that you now provide.
These are our views, and ours alone. They do not represent the official view of the Special Libraries Association’s Education Division or the Special Libraries Association.
Deborah S. Garson
Chair – Education Division, Special Libraries Association
And Members – Education Division Executive Board, Special Libraries Association
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