Education Resources Information Center
The Education Resources Information Center is also known as ERIC. It is described as “an internet-based digital library of education research and information sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.” This library has materials dated from 1966 onwards. The number of materials indexed in the database easily exceeds a million. Articles, research papers, reports and numerous other education-related materials can be obtained from the Education Resources Information Center. Researchers, teachers, librarians, media persons, students, and many others can benefit from using these materials during the course of study or in work.
The organization has a process and a set of policies according to which the journal selection is done. Experts in the field and designated officials of ERIC as well as experts from the US Department of Education are the ones who decide what goes into this extensive database. The experts come from a variety of backgrounds including adult education, vocational education, science and mathematics, information and technology, and languages and linguistics. A list of approved experts is available at the Education Resources Information Center. The website of the Education Resources Information Center has seen some changes recently. The search options have been refined and a few new links have been added on the homepage.
The index has been made more informative and the whole website is more user-friendly than it was before. A new layout has also been introduced which has speeded up the time taken for browsing through the site. The center also has a Steering Committee that makes recommendations that aid in achieving ERIC’s goals. The suggestions made by the Committee relate to developing and operating the online database, search engine and the website. The committee is also responsible for specifying the standards and criteria for selection of various materials to be included in the database. It also comes up with ways and means to publicize the ERIC database.
Individuals can also submit their articles, papers or reports to the Education Resources Information Center and provided it meets all the required criteria of the organization, it will be incorporated into the database. This can be done online and instructions are available as to the kinds of works being sought and the procedure for submissions. This is one way of getting some recognition for work done by researchers and analysts in their fields of specialization.
Searching for materials is free of cost and one can find a significant amount of information from here even if the whole article is not available on ERIC. The name of the author, the title, the type of publication and the year of publication are all available on running a search on the website. For publications that are not available with ERIC, there is a link provided to the respective publishers. Users can also choose to register on the site and create a profile of their own with an exclusive username and password. There are also some features that are available to only registered users of the site.