Changes at ERIC

OCLC is pleased to announce changes to the ERIC database. These changes
will be available Dec. 10, 2006 and are the result of the ERIC producers
changing the data they send us. Some new fields have been added; other
fields have been discontinued. The new fields apply to new records.
ERIC introduced the peer reviewed field in 2005 for journal articles
published 2004 onward. Fields that have been discontinued may remain on
legacy records but they will not be on new records. A list of the
complete changes will be sent to the Z39.50 listserv on Nov. 9. The
revised Z39.50 documentation will be available on Nov. 9 at
http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/firstsearch/z3950/z3950_databa
ses/default.htm.

Some of the changes are:

* Peer-reviewed indicator. This field indicates if a journal is
peer-reviewed. It can be searched as an index in the Expert search or
used as a limiter.

* Education level identifies the specific education community for
which the resource is intended. This field can be searched.

* Reference count is the number of references in an article.

* Major and minor descriptors and major and minor identifiers are
no longer distinguished on new records.


ERIC provides access to over 1.1 million bibliographic records for
education-related journals and non-journal literature. ERIC links to
free full-text for over 100,000 items.