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ERIC Documents - free, full-text, online

Beginning October 1, 2004 ERIC Documents (1993 -->) will be available free-of-charge, full-text, online.  This covers approximately 107,000 ERIC Documents, which will be available in PDF format.  Previously these would have to be purchased through ERIC or interlibrary loaned.

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) has undertaken to revamp itself in the past year to better provide educational resources as mandated by the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002.  Its goal is to become "a premier web-based library for accessing current and historical education resources" and will include "the studies produced by the What Works Clearinghouse in support of the Department of Education's initiative to identify the best scientifically based evidence of 'what works' in education".

The ERIC website has additional enhancements scheduled for the months ahead.

In the past the few ERIC Documents that were available online encountered long download times.  ERIC has resolved this problem "by introducing PDF image files that have been significantly compressed (3:1)".  To view these PDF files you must have Adobe 5.0 or above installed on your computer.

Some ERIC Documents can be quite large and you are more likely to encounter problems if you are trying to download these from home through a dial-up connection.  You should not encounter any problems on-campus.  Some documents may be too large to fit on a floppy disk.

ERIC Documents and Education Journals (also available through ERIC) can be accessed in three ways:

1.  EBSCOhost --> ERIC

2.  FirstSearch -->  ERIC

3.  ERIC website  http://eric.ed.gov

Searching through any of the above avenues should give you the same results.  Searching ERIC through EBSCOhost and FirstSearch does have some advantages at this time.

EBSCOhost -

Can search ERIC and other EBSCOhost databases at the same time.

Can sort results by Date, Author, Source, or Relevance.  By default the articles are sorted by Date.

FirstSearch -

Can search ERIC and up to two other FirstSearch databases at the same time.

Can sort results by Relevance or Date.  By default the articles are not sorted in any way.

ERIC website -

By default the articles are sorted by relevance.  You cannot sort in any other way.

As of October 1, 2004 the documents/articles published through ERIC in 2004 have not been added to the ERIC index.  Your search will not bring up any articles that have been published in 2004.  Some of the documents/articles are in the database (but not in the index), but you cannot retrieve them unless you know the title, author, or ERIC document number. ERIC is presently working on adding these to the index.  ERIC available through EBSCOhost and FirstSearch appear to have some of the 2004 ERIC Documents and articles in their indexes.