Back in the Dark Ages, education researchers had to use microfiche (slips of paper that held several pages of documents in smaller form) to access a vast collection of education documents through ERIC (Education Resources Information Center). To see the documents, you had to slide the slip of paper into a machine for it to be enlarged enough to read. Then came a major digitization project and we all forgot about the cabinets full of microfiche that students once used. However, in August, the Department of Education disabled access to most of these digital documents because of privacy concerns. (Some of the older documents contained SSNs.) The fulltext documents will be available online again at some point in the future but in the meantime, Lewis Library will be digging out microfiche again for students.
**This post was authored by Charlene Baxter.
No comments:
Post a Comment