EUGENE–One of the biggest publishers in Oregon is located on the University of Oregon campus, but not many people outside the education community know about this influential publishing house.

The books and articles they produce won’t show up on the average coffee table, but they have a big impact on public schools in areas as different as New Haven, Conn. and Eugene, Ore.

"We keep track of thousands of volumes of education research published each year on everything from school safety to school finance, condense it and send it to the National Library of Education," says Philip Piele, director of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Clearinghouse. "School administrators, scholars and teachers use the digests to track the latest information on critical issues in today’s schools."

The U.S. Department of Education established the original network of 12 ERIC clearinghouses in 1966 to provide educators around the country with summaries of the latest research in the field. The network has now grown to 16.

The ERIC Clearinghouse has remained at the UO for more than 33 years in spite of vigorous competition from other universities that would like to capture both the prestige and the $500,000 annual payroll the agency pumps into the local economy.

"We just won another five-year $2.44 million contract to operate the ERIC Clearinghouse through 2003," says Stuart Smith, associate director of the UO site.

Most of those dollars will stay in the Eugene area, Piele notes, because only three of the 14 clearinghouse employees live outside the Eugene-Springfield area.

Last year, the clearinghouse staff turned more than 3,000 journal articles, research reports and essays into easily read abstracts which are now stored in a national data base. ERIC also publishes three to four new books a year. The clearinghouse distributes more than 100,000 of its monthly digests to school board members, superintendents, elementary and secondary principals, and state and federal policy-makers across the nation.

The material also is available through the ERIC web site at http://eric.uoregon.edu.

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