Executive Order 14242, “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities”, signed March 20th, 2025, states the Secretary of Education “shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
One of the Department of Education services relied upon by Americans is the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) Database. The ERIC Database is “a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information”.
Initially, the full closure of the database was announced before a followup announcement indicating retention of the the historical database but cutting the budget by 50%, reducing indexing moving forward and eliminating the help desk. This cost-cutting effort was taken under the authority of Executive Order 14222, Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Cost Efficiency Initiative. An effort has been made to ensure that hosted content is preserved and accessible even in the event that circumstances change and the resource is removed suddenly. Third party vendors such as EBSCO and ProQuest will continue to have access to the metadata for their value-added products; however, the number of actively cataloged sources has been reduced by approximately 45%, starting April 24, 2025.
Some of the unresolved questions about this change is where this resource may be relocated bureaucratically within the federal government with the assumed closure of the department, what journals will no longer be indexed, and what sources may be appropriate as substitutes for front-end searching of no longer indexed journals, once that list becomes apparent.
To this last point Galvin Library has downloaded the current listing of indexed journals as a reference point to identify the removed titles once a new list of indexed sources is posted, and to determine appropriate substitutions. In the meantime, some nascent grassroots efforts at identifying these no longer indexed journals have made a very modest dent in this uncertainty. More will be forthcoming as developments warrant.
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