Report and Guidelines on Improving the Retrieval of Product Information from ERIC. Final Report.

The purpose of this project was to provide guidance to ERIC on how to facilitate product information retrieval. Information on practitioner needs, on the use of descriptors and abstracting procedures, and on alternatives for improving the system was gathered and circulated to NIE staff members. The resulting document described three alternative ways of improving access to practitioner oriented documents and presented draft guidelines for writing abstracts. The alternatives were: revising the method of descriptor assignment to produce documents; revising and expanding pubtype codes; and creating a separate system for all products, programs, and practice documents. This document was then sent out to all clearinghouse directors, directors of ERIC search services, and others with a request for comments. The responses were summarized, sample abstracts were developed and six recommendations were made: (1) pubtype codes should be refined, pilot tested, and refined again; (2) inter-clearinghouse inconsistency in indexing and abstracting should be reduced; (3) guidelines for abstracting product information should be agreed upon and entered into the Thesaurus; (4) successful computer search strategies for retrieving product documents should be available to all; (5) existing product information systems should be considered for coordination with ERIC. The above documents are presented in this report along with the responses. (DAG)