Grabbing ERIC by the tail: Introducing the ERIC commissioned papers

It’s a familiar folk tale. Three blindfolded men are put into a room with an elephant. One grabs the animal’s trunk and concludes he has found a snake. The second man runs into the elephant’s body and tells his friends that he ran into a wall. The third man grabs the elephant’s tail and announces he has found a dangling rope. The moral of this story is that one can rarely understand the whole from its parts. The authors of the commissioned papers in this issue ofGovernment Information Quarterly have clearly pointed out that ERIC has a similar problem on its hands. In 1999 The Office of Educational Research and improvement (OERI) in the U.S. Department of Education commissioned five papers (three of which are presented, with updates, in this issue. All five papers in their original form are available at http://www.accesseric.org/papers/) to begin assessing the ERIC program. It has since allocated funds for a more comprehensive program assessment to occur in 2001. What the authors of these papers knew at the start of their work was that the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) is in fact operated through 19 contracts and has been in operation for some 35 years. However, what they soon found out was that to some ERIC is a database while to others ERIC is a publisher of monographs and synthesis pieces. To still others ERIC is a website. Some call ERIC AskERIC. Some call ERIC the Gateway to Educational Materials or the Virtual Reference Desk 1 or NPIN. To some ERIC is a service for researchers. To others it’s a service for teachers or parents. Did the world know that ERIC helped shape international standards for thesauri and educational metadata? Did the world know that ERIC mounted one of the first 100 websites ever? Why didn’t the world know about these things? Because while we love to talk about “ERIC”, in truth there are many ERICs. While the authors of the commissioned papers acknowledge that ERIC has been a success over its 35-year history, they also point out that its success has not been distributed evenly across all ERIC activities nor has its success been completely institutionalized within ERIC. For example, while each ERIC Clearinghouse has its own website, there are few common