Update from the U.S. Department of Education:
The U.S. Department of Education has awarded a five-year contract for $29,195,573.00 to develop and operate the ERIC digital library of education literature and give high-quality access to educators, researchers, and the general public. The government-sponsored website http://www.eric.ed.gov provides free access to the ERIC digital library that received over 40 million visits in 2008. ERIC is the world’s largest and most frequently used digital library of education, comprised of more than 1.3 million bibliographic records indexed from 1966 to the present. More than 20% of the collection is full-text materials.
New activities in this contract include:
EEstablishment of a Library Committee, composed of school, academic, and special librarians who will recommend journals and sources, changes to the ERIC Thesaurus, and services and outreach
Collaboration with the agency’s library to digitize and process archival materials related to the history of the Department, such as early 20th century records from the Commissioner of Education
Enhanced online submission format allowing Department of Education grantees and contractors to easily submit reports and related published research
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of 486,000 digitized microfiche documents to ensure universal access
The ERIC website provides an alphabetical list of more than 984 journals currently indexed in the ERIC digital library. Non-journal or grey literature (research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, and policy papers) is also indexed from more than 760 sources under agreement with non-profit organizations, professional associations, state agencies, Federal agencies, and more. Access to full-text articles, with permission of publishers and authors, will continue to be a feature, with links provided to publishers’ websites and institutional library holdings so that users are provided several options for reading full-text materials. All materials will be processed and posted in ERIC within 30 days of receipt, and the ERIC website will be updated with new accessions weekly.
Subject-matter scholars will serve as consulting curators to review and provide advice on critical works in the current body of knowledge pertinent to ERIC topic areas. Consulting digital curators will provide technical advice on cataloging, documentation and standards, archiving, technical obsolescence, formats, and copyright issues. Strategies will be developed to assess the needs of ERIC users in order to refine and enhance the tools and materials provided in the ERIC digital library.
The contract was awarded to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) of Falls Church, Virginia, and their subcontractors: CNA Education; Synergy Enterprises; NATECH; Mulberry Technologies; WCI/Alion; Ironworks; and KSA-Plus.
ERIC is one of the most long-lived programs in the Department, having served school teachers and administrators, postsecondary faculty and students, education policy makers, researchers, parents, and others by collecting, processing, and disseminating education information. ERIC is part of the National Library of Education in the Institute of Education Sciences.