DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DILUTION OF THE FUNCTIONS OF ERIC

WHEREAS, the Department of Education has instituted changes in the operation of its online bibliographic and full-text Educational Research Information Center database that have resulted in the dilution of the functions of the ERIC Clearinghouses; and

WHEREAS, the new ERIC is only a database and will no longer answer the thousands of e-mails and calls from persons needing to connect with educational resources, which it had provided; and

WHEREAS, since 1966, Ask ERIC, user-oriented Web sites, the ERIC Digests, electronic journals, and specialized databases have been functions made available to educators, policymakers, the library community, students and researchers; and

WHEREAS, the elimination of such functions contradicts the requirement for research-based practice and policy as articulated in "No Child Left Behind"; and

WHEREAS, the ERIC Clearinghouses are an irreplaceable source of scholarly research and information for the education community as a whole; and

WHEREAS, designating an "approved" list of journals "directly related to education" could seriously compromise the scope of high-quality published knowledge relevant to education; and

WHEREAS, the contractor is encouraged to use publisher and author abstracts and indexing information, an approach that minimizes the expertise and knowledge essential to quality indexing and abstracting; and

WHEREAS, the contractor is encouraged to use automated indexing insofar as feasible, an approach that underestimates the amount of expert knowledge required for sophisticated indexing:

RESOLVED, that the AFT seek the restoration of all the functions and services previously provided by ERIC and its clearinghouses.