The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) system provides information to education writers for newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. ERIC can be used to find the names of reliable sources in a given field, as well as background information for an in-depth article or broadcast. The ERIC collection of documents on microfiche is housed at 650 public institutions, some of which also provide computer searches of the data base for a fee of approximately 15 to 25 dollars. The Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors suggests the appropriate subject terms for an ERIC search. The computer search results in a printout of abstracts and bibliographic citations; these are scanned in order to decide which microfiche, photocopies, or journals to request. Two printed indexes also provide bibliographic citations and abstracts, and are indexed by ERIC descriptors: (1) Resources in Education (RIE)--listing research reports, project summaries, and conference papers that are available as part of the ERIC microfiche collection; and (2) Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE)--which indexes articles from education journals. ERIC does not provide microfiche or photocopies of articles cited in CIJE. A directory of the 16 ERIC clearinghouses, each specializing in a different subject area, is appended. (Author/GDC)