Indexing Procedures in ERIC

What's being added?

First new content 7/25/05

The first indexing done under the new ERIC contract was released on June 25, 2005. According to the flyer distributed by the ERIC booth in the ALA exhibits hall, it included the 2004-2005 content of more than 100 journals and items from 60 non-journal providers, such as public and professional organizations. Please note, at this time the new content is available only from the eric.ed.gov site. Vendor contracts are not yet in place so vendors (FirstSearch, Ebsco, Ovid, CSA, etc.) do not yet have this content.
Quality of new indexing

For journal articles, the new content uses the journal abstract. In addition to the note "Full-text not available from ERIC" there are links to the journal home page in the same location where a link to text would be for items available online.

For ED items, there seems to be some use of publisher provided language, but the abstracts appear to be ERIC products. One disappointment, no link from ERIC to freely available full-text content on the provider's web page.
Status of ERIC Content
 When the Clearinghouse contracts expired in December of 2003, all new indexing ceased. The new contract calls for ongoing indexing to begin being available in December 2004; that deadline was not met. The 2004 gap, caused by the changeover was to have been eliminated by the end of January 2005, once again, the deadline was not met. Both the contractor and the ERIC office have been frank about the missed deadlines, but have explicitly decided not to offer a revised timetable. Now that new content has begun to appear, they say it will continue to appear on a weekly basis.
Abstract guidlines from ERIC User Group meeting 1/16/05 Q. Are the rules on writing abstracts the same as before?
A. At the present time, yes. The contractor is in the process of clarifying specific abstracting rules for different types of categories of documents, such as research reports, evaluation reports, conference papers, bibliographies, and so forth, and devising a plan for developing a common structure and format for abstracts. The approved abstract guidelines will be posted on the ERIC Web site this year so contributors may submit abstracts to ERIC using a common structure and format. There will be another staff team, different from the curators, who will create, enhance and/or edit abstracts submitted by publishers and/or contributors. One difference with the new journal records is that the abstracts may be longer than those provided in the past. Previously journal article abstracts could only contain 50 words. Now ERIC is allowing longer abstracts to make them more complete.
What does the contract say?
The contract calls for several features for the new product. These are gradually being developed:
Still plan to be comprehensive, have not met timeline, but claim they will. p. 11 "...the contractor shall add all articles in approved journals and the selected non-journal materials within one month of the publication or release date (including release of digital materials on websites) and shall add selected unpublished material within one month of receipt."
Not clear how this will work. Contractor has received significant expressions of concern about these plans. p. 12 "The contractor shall encourage organizations to submit abstracts and indexing information and shall use publisher and author abstracts and information to the maximum extent possible."
p. 13 "The contractor shall use automated indexing insofar as feasible and shall use indexing services and methods as necessary to assure that all materials are accurately and reliably indexed. "
Labelling for quality, rather than excluding items that are not quantitative studies seems to be the route being chosen.

p. 13 "The metadata shall provide the user with information about the descriptive qualities of each database entry.

In the first User Group meeting the contractor emphasized that they were actively considering several possible quality indicators. Peer review status of the journals is being implemented via the list of journals covered. Other indicators: the selection rate of articles submitted to a journal; circulation of a journal; whether authors must pay the publisher to publish their articles may be included later.
   

July 11, 2005