From modest beginnings, ERIC has grown both as a documentation system and as a service organization. The current status of the system is reviewed in several areas: organizational structure and operation, collection strengths and acquisitions procecures, technical developments in vocabulary improvement, auxiliary reference tools, and efforts to…

Includes description of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), critical examination of the ERIC Thesaurus' structure and design, and a discussion of its descriptors, scope notes, multiword terms, coverage, and linguistics. Four online searches are described and search subject treatment in three other educational thesauri are compared…

Examines the differences between terms used in four major computerized information retrieval systems in education--British National Bibliography (PRECIS); ERIC; European Documentation and Information System for Education (EUDISED); and the International Bureau of Education (IBE) thesaurus. The possibility of standardizing terminology across all…

Describes a study of the computer searches performed by 14 education specialists on the ERIC database. Interviews with users indicate they felt retrieved materials were relevant, the database provides access to materials not obtainable through other sources, and the proportion of irrelevant items in the output is not significant. (MBR)