 All About ERIC
ERIC Mission, Audience, and Goals
Mission
The mission of the ERIC system is to improve American education by increasing and facilitating the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision making, and research, wherever and whenever these activities take place.
Audience
The ERIC audience includes teachers, professors, and librarians; school and college administrators, counselors, instructional media staff, and support personnel; educational researchers; educational policymakers at every level; students and nonformal learners at every age and level, including adult learners; parents; health and social services personnel and caregivers who support families, parents, students, and children; and the media and business communities as they relate to education.
Goals
Five years ago, the ERIC system established goals to provide easy, affordable access to ERIC bibliographic and full-text resources from every school, library, household, and point of educational decision making; expand ERIC's database and services to make useful information available to all categories of users; expand the ERIC information-synthesizing function to include a greater number and variety of publications and to use a greater variety of dissemination methods; deliver documents in various full-text electronic formats as well as in microfiche and paper forms; and further develop electronic access to ERIC, including the development of virtual libraries and Web sites.
The ERIC program recently commissioned five papers to collect and analyze research and information on the ERIC system in five areas: mission, structure, and resources; database and operational processes; technology; user services; and products and information dissemination. The authors of these papers, who are experts in their field, were asked to recommend changes to the ERIC system and to highlight important issues to be addressed in a forthcoming evaluation. The authors' recommendations and the results from the forthcoming evaluation will be used to formulate goals for the next phase of ERIC and to help ERIC meet current and future needs.
| Educational Resources Information Center |
National Library of Education |
Office of Educational Research and Improvement |
U.S. Department of Education |
| Luna Levinson |
Sheila McGarr |
Grover J. Whitehurst |
Roderick R. Paige |
| Director |
Director |
Assistant Secretary |
Secretary |
All About ERIC was prepared by Lynn Smarte, ACCESS ERIC Project Director, and the ACCESS ERIC staff.
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This page was updated on Fri Nov 2 19:13:42 GMT 2001 
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