The ERIC Collection

ERIC is an acronym that stands for Educational Resources Information Center, and is a program of the US Department of Education. The purpose of the program is to make educational research and other materials available to the public. Access to these materials is provided by the ERIC database (of which more than one version exists).

The ERIC database includes three different kinds of records: ERIC Documents, ERIC Journal Articles, and ERIC Digests.

ERIC documents are mainly non-commercially produced materials and include such things as government reports, curriculum guides, technical reports, research papers, conference proceedings, opinion papers, and so on. From 1966 to September 2004, full-text ERIC documents were issued on microfiche. After September 2004, full-text ERIC documents were made available only online. Many documents produced between 1994 and 2004 are available both on microfiche and online.

ERIC documents are designated as "ED" in the ERIC database, and each ERIC document is assigned a six-digit ED number (e.g., ED 455 101). The Educational Resources Center in Maxwell Library has the entire ERIC microfiche collection, spanning 1966 to 2004, and containing over 500,000 documents. The microfiche documents are housed in the ERC in filing cabinets according to their ED numbers.

In addition to providing access to ERIC documents, the ERIC database also indexes approximately 1000 journals in education and related fields. Currently, the ERIC database contains over 600,000 journal article citations and abstracts. ERIC journal articles are designated as "EJ" in the database. Typically, ERIC journal articles are not available full-text in the ERIC database (depending on the version of the database used, links to full-text or additional information on obtaining full-text may be available).

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Last Modified: November 5, 2009