What
is ERIC? 
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is
a government-supported organization that provides a variety of
information resources for educators.
These include a web site (www.askeric.org),
lesson plans, recommended web sites for subject specialists, and more.
One of those resources is the ERIC educational database.
This electronic database identifies and summarizes journal
articles and ERIC Documents (non-journal information) going
back to 1966. The ERIC
Database is the largest and most comprehensive guide to these two types
of literature.
Journal Articles
ERIC tracks down and
summarizes articles from approximately 980 education and
education-related journals. Some
of these journals are intended for teachers or practitioners; others are
aimed at educational researchers. If
one adds up all of the articles from these journals covering 35 years,
the total number of articles included approaches 500,000.
These articles cover virtually every topic of interest to
educators and educational researchers.
ERIC Documents
ERIC Documents are not
journal articles, but rather are things like conference papers from
education conferences, special reports issued by education
organizations, government reports on issues in education, program
evaluations of new programs or curricula, or curriculum guides developed
by schools, among other things. The
one thing these ERIC Documents have in common is that they typically
were NOT published in journals. However,
ERIC Documents can be quite useful, though they do vary in quality and
their originating source always needs to be considered when evaluating
the information. In any
event, there are now approximately 500,000 of these ERIC Documents
identified in the database. Many
college and university libraries with access to the ERIC database, such
as Akron, also purchase ALL of these ERIC documents on microfiche.
So, even though some of the documents seem obscure, our library
should have that document on microfiche.
These microfiche are located in the rear, right corner of the
basement of Bierce Library.
If you add up all of the
journal articles and ERIC Documents that are in the ERIC database, it
approaches one million items. This
is a tremendous amount of education information that you, the user, can
search in a matter of a few minutes.
This is what makes the ERIC database the single most important
database you could use for identifying journal articles or documents in
education. It is a powerful
complement to whatever relevant books you identify using ZipLINK (the
University of Akron library’s book catalog) or OhioLINK (the statewide
book catalog).
