Stotsky Lends Expertise to Strengthening Database
Posted on 10/29/2007
An educational database is only as good as its content and ease in searching, two aspects the people at the Education Resources Information Center, or ERIC, continually examine with the help of education experts such as Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas.
Stotsky holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in Teacher Quality in the College of Education and Health Professions. She came to the university in August after several years as an education scholar, researcher and consultant in Massachusetts, including service as senior associate commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Several years ago, Stotsky was asked to serve as a content expert and member of the steering committee for ERIC, an Internet-based digital library of education research and information. The U.S. Department of Education sponsors the database through its Institute of Education Sciences. ERIC provides free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text.
ERIC was created in 1966 as an innovative government project for archiving education publications of all kinds, called ERIC documents, preserving them on microfiche and providing them to libraries all over the country. They added indexing for journals to the project from 1969 to the present.
With advances in technology, ERIC now provides the documents as a growing collection of full-text materials in Adobe PDF format, including reports from the What Works Clearinghouse. Gary Ritter, Stotsky’s colleague in the college’s Department of Education Reform, is one of several subcontractors to the clearinghouse. Another entity under the Institute of Education Sciences umbrella, the clearinghouse collects, screens and identifies studies of effectiveness of educational interventions. Ritter holds the department’s Twenty-First Century Chair in Education Policy.
“ERIC is the most important database for people in the education field,” said Elizabeth McKee, education librarian in the reference department at Mullins Library at the University of Arkansas. “When the government started indexing documents and putting them on microfiche, making them available to collections around the country, that was quite unique. ERIC was one of the early prototypes of electronic databases and the first on this campus to become available to the public.”
Before that time, databases were primarily used by the defense and medical industries, McKee said, but with ERIC the federal government turned its attention to supporting education for the general populace.
In mid-October, Stotsky, whose areas of expertise include reading and instruction, spent two days in Washington, D.C., at the 2007 ERIC Content Experts Meeting. The content experts worked with staff members of Computer Services Corp., the contractor for this ERIC project, on aspects of acquiring subject-specific, education-related resources for inclusion in the ERIC database. Using the selection standards and criteria developed with the guidance of the ERIC Steering Committee, they recommend journals to be included in ERIC as well as sources and types of non-journal materials, conferences and dissemination strategies. The day-to-day work of building and managing the ERIC collection is handled by the contractor’s curators with expertise in 16 topics.
“Our job is to provide guidance on strengthening the database,” Stotsky said. “We want to be sure it contains all the mainstream journals, but we also want to examine those that fall into a gray area, that may or may not cover education exclusively but could provide useful information. At this meeting, we reviewed emerging trends and went over journal lists.
“We made recommendations on good sources of information that ERIC should seek to add to the database.”
The experts also looked at descriptors, or terms used in searching, to be sure they were up-to-date and could produce accurate results.
Users of the database conduct more than 6 million searches each month through the ERIC Web site.
“This work is very stimulating,” Stotsky said. “Basically, we are looking at how to classify knowledge, where to look for sources and how to make judgments about their usefulness. This information is available to a wide range of audiences from parents to graduate students.”
McKee noted two efforts by ERIC to improve its offerings: it is addressing a gap of material in 2002 and 2003 and is continuing to digitize older documents. It is currently digitizing older ERIC documents from 1982 forward.
An ERIC news release says the gap of indexed records that occurred during the transition from a paper-based operation to a streamlined electronic service includes about 300 journal titles and material from non-journal providers.
More than 8,000 additional full-text documents have been released to the public as ERIC’s Microfiche Digitization Project continues, according to information on the ERIC site. To date, more than 30,000 documents published on microfiche by ERIC between 1982 and 1992 have been made available in full text, and digitized content will continue to be released on a monthly basis.
ERIC continues to seek the permission of copyright holders to release their older works in electronic full text and has an online form for that purpose, too. Instructions for sending material to ERIC can be found at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/resources/html/contribute.html.
“ERIC has the most education journals in one place,” McKee said. “We encourage faculty and students to use the ERIC database because it covers documents, research reports, journal articles, and even cites books, all in one database. We want them to understand that, even though the journals are not all full-text within the database, the UA Libraries subscribe to so many electronic journals they will still be able to get the online material at their desktop that is so important to researchers these days. All the journals we subscribe to online are listed in the Libraries’ catalog, InfoLinks.”
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