ERIC Educational application of Text on Demand

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is a U.S. 
Department of Education funded national information system 
providing educators access to education-related resources.  


The ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology at Syracuse University
is one of sixteen national clearinghouses (others include for example
clearinghouses on science, mathematics, and environmental education;
teaching and teacher education; languages and linguistics).  The AskERIC
program at Syracuse University is sponsored by ERIC and features a 
professional information 
intermediary who interacts with teachers (as well as parents, 
librarians, administrators) accessing full text ERIC Digests and Help 
Sheets, training and reference materials for Internet use, and links to 
other ERIC subject-specialized clearinghouses and educational 
resources such as classroom teaching modules and educational 
experiments.  AskERIC is Internet based, began with service to three 
state networks (Texas, New York, and Massachusetts) and is rapidly 
growing.  On-line resouces include full text records of the AskERIC 
electronic library, a 750 thousand record bibliographic library which 
grows at the rate of 20 thousand entires per year, 11 thousand full 
text educational digest, and the ARPA sponsored project TIPSTER test 
collection.  The current collection of text based information is approximately
15 gigabytes.

As an example transaction,
AskERIC receives Internet queries from teachers, for example a teacher 
looking for information on using mnemonics in teaching earth science.
AskERIC staff would then perform a database search of the central ERIC 
database, or query the ERIC clearinghouse on Science, Mathematics, and 
Environment Education in Ohio.  Current searches are limited to simple key
matching.  A likely outcome would be a set of queries by subject matter 
specialists at the Ohio clearinghouse to related databases available over the 
Internet.

For queries where reference information is not available, AskERIC would
link the teacher with network based discussion groups to find people
with appropriate expertise.  In subject areas where frequently asked
questions are observed, ERIC publishes a digest on hot topics such as
year round school, or block scheduling of classroom time.

At present, full text search is not available.  Queries are limited to 2 or
three key words which are used to explicitly match database records.
Human intermediaries must rely on experience and intutition to select
appropriate avenues of inquiry.  The thousands of inquires and responses
to AskERIC is in itself a useful database that could be used by
teachers and ERIC information professional staff.