The changes: (Please remember that in attempting to distill a 29 page document, quotes are necessarily taken out of context.)

1. Indexing changes
2. Expertise
3. User services/Clearinghouse services lost
4. Reliance on outside vendors
5. Technical specifications & Integration with other databases

The Department of Education has issued a Solicitation that includes the Request for Proposals, and the Statement of Work for ERIC. The new Statement of Work is similar to the Draft but does contain some significant changes that are clearly a response to the feedback the Department of Education received on the Draft. The most significant of those changes are highlighted here. In addition to the Statement of Work and the Request for Proposals the Solicitation also contains Invoicing Instructions, Past Performance Forms, and Amendment 01 posted July 22 adds the Quality Assurance Plan and a Question and Answer segment as well as postponing the due date to August 18.

To assure that all information remains available while minimizing the amount of time taken to get postings up, comparative information about the two Statements of Work has simply been added to the pages originally put up in response to the Draft Statement of Work. The comments on the Draft will still be there, below the new comparative information and many of them are still relevant.

The Statement of Work still details an ERIC system that would be a major change from the system as it is today. It centralizes ERIC, though it now explicitly welcomes bids from "a team of vendors" (p.2). It eliminates the Clearinghouses and in fact explicitly eliminates the provision in the Draft SOW that "Electronic files of website contents" (p.19 of Draft) be transferred to the new contractor. There has been some response to concerns about the indexing, both the number of items included and the quality of citations. Some portions of the SOW may not be feasible. (see p. 17 & 20 for requirement that experienced and inexperienced users be able "to find all database materials that are directly relevant to their questions or problems.")

There has also been some response to concerns about user service. The SOW does a much better job than the Draft of requiring assistance for all users, but of course it does not require retaining the Clearinghouse network, their web page content, or the synthesis services they provided. Library concerns that the Department was focusing on commercial sources to the exclusion of libraries have been addressed with new requirements that the database be able to link to library holdings.

Last update August 15, 2003