ERIC - RFI 2022.pdf

July 1, 2022

EDUCATION RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)

Request for Information & Market Research

Introduction

The Institute of Education Sciences (“IES”) in the Department of Education (the “Department”) seeks to contract with a vendor or team of vendors to operate and make continuous improvements to the usefulness and usability of the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC). ERIC is an online bibliographic and full-text digital library of education research, including journal articles and non-journal materials. The role of the ERIC contractor is to generate the metadata for the database that underlies the ERIC website, create documentation about the metadata and website, and to communicate with ERIC users. The ERIC website is developed, maintained, and hosted by separate contracts and are outside of the scope of this requirement.

The mission of ERIC is to provide broad access to education research in a user-friendly, timely, and efficient manner. ERIC provides these services to schools, institutions of higher education, educators (including early childhood educators), parents, administrators, policymakers, researchers, public and private entities (including providers of early childhood services), entities responsible for carrying out technical assistance through the Department, and the general public.

ERIC has sought to accomplish this mission through the development and maintenance of a comprehensive, searchable, Internet-based library of bibliographic references and associated full-text, when such text is freely available.

The ERIC database currently contains 1.9 million bibliographic records and more than 385,000 full-text materials. Each ERIC bibliographic record contains an abstract of a journal article or non-journal document (e.g., technical report, conference paper), along with indexed information such as author, title, and publication date.

A government-sponsored website, https://eric.ed.gov, provides free access to the ERIC digital library. ERIC’s metadata are made available for vendors and the public through the Downloads section of the ERIC website: https://eric.ed.gov/?download and through an API:

https://eric.ed.gov/?api. Various subscription services and freely available Internet search engines provide access to ERIC by redistributing ERIC metadata.

Acquisition agreements with journal publishers and education membership associations, education organizations, universities, state education agencies, and other sources of non-journal materials provide source materials for the ERIC digital library. All work indexed in ERIC must be in scope of the ERIC Selection Policy, found at https://eric.ed.gov/?selection. The list of approved journals is listed here: https://eric.ed.gov/?journals and the approved non-journal sources are listed here: https://eric.ed.gov/?nonjournals.

The ERIC database contains citations included in the digital library and is updated weekly.

Approximately 4,000 new entries are added per month. ERIC indexes over 1,276 journals. In addition, ERIC includes 719 sources of “grey literature” (materials not published by commercial publishers). Individual authors are invited to contribute their full-text documents, abstracts, and bibliographic data to ERIC through an online submission system; these documents are considered for inclusion in the ERIC database if they meet the guidelines set forth in the ERIC Selection Policy.

Over 12 million users search ERIC every year. Currently, users can search for resources using the well-developed ERIC Thesaurus (a controlled vocabulary of descriptors) and a variety of search limiters. Users can refine their search by author, audience, source, education level, publication type, peer review status, and the availability of full text.

The website is hosted in the IES Data Center and maintained by the IES Web Support contract.

The ERIC contractor is responsible for creating the records to support the database that underlies the website. The contractor is not responsible for posting records to the website or making changes to the website.

In order to support the FY23 competition, the Department announces an extensive Request for Information and Vendor Engagement effort. Please read this document in its entirety. The information that you provide may play a substantial role in shaping this procurement and may affect the composition of the Performance Work Statement (PWS), Instructions to Offerors, and Source Selection Criteria. Vendors are encouraged to provide feedback now so as to enable the Department to address as many questions as possible before release of the solicitation.

This document consists of three major information request components to be submitted in three parts:

(1) Request for capability statements.

(2) Targeted vendor outreach questions and responses.

(3) Request for comment and feedback on the following solicitation components on the PWS

Detailed information for each request is located in the appropriate subsection below. In the event that vendors have questions, please note the contact information for Carlina Smith and Aayush Kapur are listed below.

Please review this document carefully as it is designed to streamline the acquisition process and avoid an extensive question-answer period during the active solicitation phase. Please feel free to submit additional questions as part of your document response so that the Department may address your questions prior to release of the solicitation.

Please note that all solicitation-related documents in this RFI are draft versions. The content of each document may change substantially between release of this RFI and release of the final Solicitation. The final solicitation will be governed by the terms, conditions, instructions, and criteria in that document. Offerors should not rely on the contents of this RFI for preparing final proposals. To the extent that information provided in this document is inconsistent with or contradicts information contained in the final Solicitation, the Solicitation controls.

Submission Instructions

Detailed information for the required submission is provided below. Offerors should submit, via email, the following documents to joseph.gibbs@ed.gov with a cc to aayush.kapur@ed.gov no later than August 5, 2022.

I. One PDF document that contains your Capability Statement (PDF).

II. One PDF document that contains your response to vendor questions.

III. One WORD document that contains any comments, track change revisions, or edits to the PWS. Narrative justifications for changes are also welcome if appropriate. If offerors have additional questions regarding any of the three documents please feel free to include this information in a separate heading in your WORD document that contains these questions in addition to any narrative information.

Offerors should submit all three documents in one email. Please note that the Department imposes a 15MB file size limitation. This limitation accounts for potential file size increases associated with Microsoft Cloud services and may be different from earlier Department file size restrictions.

Participation in this vendor outreach effort is entirely voluntary. A response to this RFI is not required in order to respond to any solicitation that the Department issues.

Contact Information Please note that only the individuals listed below are authorized points of contact for this competition. No members of the IES staff (ERIC project staff or otherwise) will respond to inquiries even if the individual is responsible for technical direction under an existing ERIC contract.

The following members comprise the acquisition team for this procurement:

Primary Points of Contact

Aayush Kapur aayush.kapur@ed.gov Contract Specialist

Joseph Gibbs joseph.gibbs@ed.gov Contracting Officer/Source Selection Authority

Request for Capability Statements

Proposed NAICS Information: 541511, Custom Computer Programming Services Proposed Product Service Code: R605, Library Services

The Department requests capability statements in order to evaluate what, if any, set aside determinations are appropriate. The Department will make a small business set aside determination for the program as a whole. We reserve the right to use other resources and information to inform our acquisition strategy.

The Department will not review generic capability statements because generic capability statements tell us nothing about your ability to execute an ERIC contract. Rather, we will only review capability statements that conform to the specifications provided below.

Format and Instructions for Capability Statements

Capability statements are limited to 8 pages (not including the cover page) and must be submitted in PDF format. The Department will not consider material in excess of 8 pages.

1. Cover Page containing the following information:

Name of Company Primary Point of Contact (phone and email) DUNS Number Small Business Status for the applicable NAICS code (if not a small business, please indicate “OTSB” in this field)

2. Substantive Content

The capability statement must describe the collective expertise and experience of your company’s personnel, in each of the following areas. Clearly indicate if the expertise is not possessed by the prime contractor, but instead by a potential subcontractor or contractor:

Demonstrated experience developing bibliographic records. Interested parties shall provide documentation of the breadth of expertise developing bibliographic records of journal and grey literature sources. This includes creating records, applying appropriate terms from a controlled vocabulary, developing abstracts, and cataloging the record.

Experience developing and maintain a selection policy. Interested parties shall provide specific and detailed examples of successful past experience in developing and updating a selection policy for a library or digital repository of literature.

Interested parties shall also include any relevant experience evaluating sources against the selection policy to determine their inclusion in the library.

Experience and skill in development and management of applications in a similar technical environment. Interested parties shall provide evidence of design, development, and management of a website in a .NET environment similar to that of the IES Data Center.

Experience digitizing microfiche. Interested parties shall provide examples of their work digitizing microfiche into 508 Compliant PDFs.

Experience and skill in successfully managing a help desk or similar system that serves as the public-facing representative of an investment and involves managing technical questions. Interested parties shall provide evidence of experience in managing a help desk or similar responsive system to respond to inquiries of a technical nature related to the review and synthesis of quantitative studies of interventions, requiring a high degree of content knowledge to respond or facilitate responses.

Experience in creating informative videos, infographics, and webinars on complex technical topics that conform to plain language standards. Interested parties shall provide evidence of successful experience with creating informative videos, infographics, and webinars in plain language for non-technical audiences.

Vendor Questions

(1) What, if any, additional information should the Department provide in order to enable you to accurately estimate the price/cost of each task?

(2) Are the NAICS and PSC codes appropriate for this procurement? If not, please justify an alternative.

(3) Can you identify any barriers to competition? If so, please identify and describe how the Department could reduce or eliminate those barriers.

(4) Is there any other information that you wish to convey to the Department?