The notice on the site: The full text documents for ERIC have been temporarily disabled due to a privacy concern. We apologize for the inconvenience and are currently working to isolate the affected documents and return full text access to users as quickly as possible. Please stay tuned to eric.ed.gov for an update on when they will become available again. - Kirsten

eep. wonder what happened. - RepoRat

I'm wondering whether some of the old ones had SSNs on them somewhere, or something of that sort. - Kirsten

Ah, this helps to explain it. - OMG 404 Joe

Sigh - Christina Pikas from iPhone

It's been like this for almost a week now. Please, please, please be back before September... - Megan loves summer

Thanks for the heads up. Yikes - what a week. - Jen

Megan: Classes start Monday here. And as I'm the liaison librarian to education, I'm not looking forward to the email I'm going to have to send later today. - Kirsten

We made the decision to toss our ERIC microfiche earlier this summer. Waiting for that one colleague to say "I told you so." *Sigh* - Jen

Good luck, Kirsten... :-( - Megan loves summer

I wish our Ed dept would notice ERIC was not working. - barbara fister from iPhone

on what platform? We have no problem accessing it here - RudĩϐЯaЯïan

Rudy, they've restored some of them, but not all. I was wondering what the privacy thing is, but the SSN part makes sense. My Ed dept hasn't noticed either, but we do have the fiche, so... - ~Courtney F

There have been some posts on the EBSS-L mailing list. A USDE person said today that the journal articles should be up this week. It's still vague on the other stuff but they say it's for "privacy concerns." Another poster on the list brings up the good point that maybe there should be an independent backup for the materials - Megan loves summer

A statement I read this morning basically boiled it down to 'security through obscurity': back in the old days, everything was on fiche, so it was hard to find personally identifying information, and now it's easier because of that darned internet thing. In other words, somebody found identifying information about a study subject in a report and told them about it. - DJF

Oof. Any sense of how old the report was? - RepoRat

no idea. They've put up all the journal articles and peer reviewed stuff, but the other ERIC docs are all off-line indefinitely, until they can be reviewed. - DJF

good lord. that's got to be a huge PITA. - RepoRat

"These will be the only documents available at this time due to privacy concerns about information contained in some of the collection. Although the documents in ERIC had been publicly available in ERIC microfiche for many years, the advent of the Internet has amplified the possibility that someone could make improper use of information in these ERIC documents. - DJF

"We are seeking to restore access to the rest of the collection as soon as possible. Our number one concern is to ensure that any full-text documents we provide do not violate any individual's privacy. We believe that if any of us were to have our privacy compromised by an ERIC document, we would want the same consideration." - DJF

wow - $tephanie•Gardening

This is fascinating. Couldn't this take years? What algorithm could you possibly use? - Meg V. Meg

some personally-identifiable information breaches have patterns, e.g. one can look for possible SSNs and phone numbers. as a practical matter, though, you can't use an algorithm to look for reidentification risk, inappropriately-unredacted names, or similar. this is gonna be a huge problem for ERIC! - RepoRat

There's a good recap of the situation here: http://ericweeding.wordpress.com/2012... - Megan loves summer

Thanks to this thread, i was just able to answer a chat question quickly AND determine that we have the eric doc in question on fiche in storage. There was no fumbling around to try to figure out what was wrong. - ellbeecee

Another update (from 8.23.12): "We have made all peer reviewed articles publicly available again-this is approximately 20,000 full-text articles. We are also in the process of creating a request process for individual records to be given priority in being returned to the site. I hope to provide more information on that process in the next week." - Kirsten

Just noticed that in the stream (which I am disrupting) this fell close to a link to Document Freedom Day. - barbara fister