Concept Paper on Electronic STI Management Presented at DOE STIP Meeting, Feb. 3, 1998

Purpose

The goal of this STIP meeting is to reach agreement on the concepts expressed in this paper for electronic STI management, as well as to begin to define and clarify how procedures and responsibilities in a decentralized environment will be changing. This will ensure that the STIP community meets the challenges and realizes the benefits of the Information Age.

Background

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information - like the entire Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP) community - is in a state of transition to electronic STI. OSTI is re-engineering its paper-based processing of incoming scientific and technical information, with accompanying workflow tasks and software designed for paper reports, to a primarily electronic processing environment. With this change, it is redesigning a number of processes using new software, new descriptions of the workflow functions, and generally a new perspective on the requirements.

In 1994, OSTI and its STI partners and stakeholders recognized that the Departmental STI Program was in a changing environment of:

1. Less centralized control;
2. Reduced reliance on compliance; and
3. More focus on outcome than process.

Over the past four years, OSTI and the STI community together have made significant strides in defining agreeable electronic exchange formats; in streamlining paper-based processes to the bare essentials; in creating collections of digitized STI; and in developing the Energy Science and Technology Virtual Library: EnergyFiles. EnergyFiles is envisioned as the umbrella system for the STI collections and more. Now, with the STIP Strategic Plan as the blueprint and coupled with the latest information technologies, the Department's STI Program is positioned to define the next generation of STI access and dissemination processing in a decentralized environment. This paper provides a concept of the approach to be taken, envisioned changes, roles and responsibilities of involved parties, and the anticipated benefits.

Future Approach to Electronic STI Processing

Changes at OSTI

OSTI is committed to meeting the paper-to-electronic challenge in FY 1998. Right now, it is in the midst of planning and defining significant changes within OSTI's processing systems which will allow greater flexibility to all those who submit STI. These changes will forever alter the Department's STI Program.

• OSTI is procuring commercial-off-the-shelf software to replace the existing inflexible Report Processing System and affiliated processes. A new database management system, electronic document management system, and other associated hardware/software platforms will be in place by the end of FY 1998 which will make better and easier use of network technology, provide automated workflow, and broaden acceptance of electronic formats.
  
• The new system configuration and functional requirements will be defined to meet the needs of our primary customers and stakeholders. Considerations include:
  -- Reduction of bibliographic data requirements to a core set of metadata for DOE's STI collections;
  -- Acceptance of a range of native full-text formats;
  -- Empowerment of originators in the review, release, and quality-assurance standards for STI; and
  -- Providing a final repository for the originating sites or programs which do not intend to host public access to full-text documents permanently.

• The design is largely to expedite electronic full-text and electronic metadata, although the system will accommodate paper STI to a lesser extent when needed.
  
• The focus of OSTI staff will be on value-added functions, such as subject analysis or product innovation, proactively supporting the needs of the STI originating sites, providing problem resolution, facilitating life-cycle practices, as well as serving the full-text needs of the end-users. The redesigned process will require fewer resources for routine processing and creation of bibliographic databases.

What remains unchanged is OSTI's dedication to meet the needs of its customers and stakeholders who desire access to DOE's STI. OSTI will continue to maintain a central locator to DOE's STI through the DOE Information Bridge, which will be innovatively improved over the next few months. OSTI will continue to fulfill Departmental mandates for broad public dissemination by administering various agreements with intermediaries for public access to include NTIS, GPO, and international exchanges. Agreements with external partners will be modified to reflect the changing environment for electronic STI.

Acknowledging Efforts of Originating Sites

• Sites routinely review the STI product prior to publication for proper clearances - such as patent or intellectual property review, classification review, and other approvals. OSTI has traditionally provided a second review to ensure that markings were consistent and that only appropriate documents were publicly released. Electronic or Web-based publishing through distributed sources makes a second review by OSTI impractical and unwarranted. Therefore, OSTI will be eliminating most of its evaluation function and will accept the release and announcement markings provided by the sites.
• Validation of metadata elements provided to OSTI in the future will be accomplished via automation as much as possible; rules will be relaxed significantly. Some consistency will be built in by having computerized pick-lists for certain metadata elements provided to the sites. Which "authorities" are needed will soon be determined. However, the traditional OSTI process of intervening through manual input or editing of data will be significantly curtailed.
• The advent of site-hosted publicly accessible servers has also changed who accounts for public release. Traditionally, DOE's external stakeholders (OMB, GAO, Congress, and others) have relied on OSTI's publication dates as the official public release record for DOE's STI. Both credit and accountability will properly rest with the site which publicly releases and makes STI openly available.
• A broader range of electronic full-text formats, such as standard word processing formats, will be accommodated in the redesigned process. OSTI will be able to carry the native format (one of the accepted formats in which the originating site created the STI) for certain uses, as well as making a number of electronic formats available for access in STI products (such as DOE Information Bridge). OSTI currently has scanned over 23,000 DOE technical reports and made them available through the DOE Information Bridge. Significant costs and issues exist in the search/retrieval, user access, and the required hardware/software systems to handle such information. Scanning will continue, on a decreased basis, until hard-copy submittal of information is eventually phased out. This change in practice will allow users to view the STI product in its original version as created by the site, in addition to accessing the product in a standard format (currently TIFF G4 is used, but OSTI is planning for a future standard to be a full-text searchable format, although transition plans are not firm at this time).

Roles & Responsibilities

In this new electronic paradigm, traditional roles and responsibilities of OSTI will change, as will the role of submitting sites. The distributed processing model which is envisioned would include the following:

• A reduced set of metadata would be provided by sites to OSTI in lieu of the current data provided on the DOE F 1332.15. The metadata record would serve as the official notification of the release and announcement of an STI document/product. There will be a number of methods for providing the metadata: (1) via a new Web form similar to the process for using the Web version of the 1332.15; (2) batch processing from site databases that capture the metadata during the site's document preparation; or (3) providing appropriately tagged elements accompanying an electronic full-text document.
• Methods for including electronic full-text documents into the "DOE collection" will also be broadened. Envisioned are: (1) a full-text document may be transmitted to OSTI with the corresponding metadata; (2) the site may post it at a location for OSTI to capture it upon notification via the metadata; or (3) the site may choose to host access to the full-text and provide OSTI the metadata record with a unique URL to link to each full-text document on the site's server.
• OSTI will then process the incoming metadata through automated validations and authorities and create a "metadata repository" as a central locator of DOE's STI.
• Based on STIP stakeholder feedback, OSTI intends to continue to provide subject expertise for search/retrieval purposes and to utilize automated tools to the extent possible to create subject categories, keywords, and abstracts when not provided by the sites. OSTI will potentially maintain controlled vocabularies/thesauri to facilitate subsequent search/retrieval and dissemination.
• Metadata stored in the central repository will provide the locator to all full-text, which will be made available to users through an improved DOE Information Bridge that incorporates distributed linking and searching features such as those tested in the Federated Collections Pilot project, but with the additional feature of providing a comprehensive full-text index to DOE's STI, which will serve as a key component of EnergyFiles.
• In the near term, OSTI will maintain the capability to process paper-copy received from sites unable to submit electronic full-text documents in one of the accepted formats, but the priority for processing and access will be lower than for the electronic documents.

Benefits

Several benefits will occur within the DOE STI community as a result of a Departmental redesigned electronic STI management concept:

• Places management of information closer to originator, who best knows the information.
• Recognizes the site which created and made the STI available.
• Imposes less control and compliance.
• Focuses on the outcome (broader access to STI) rather than the process.
• Reduces costs incurred for processing paper documents.
• Improves timely availability of scientific and technical information.
• Establishes the framework for distributed access to scientific and technical information across disparate Departmental sites.
• Reduces processing costs of the sites through the acceptance of more electronic native formats.
• Positions the Department to better respond to changing technologies.
• Eliminates creating and maintaining duplicative data systems (at sites and at OSTI), thus saving costs for STI processes DOE-wide.
• Encourages/facilitates STIP community to identify and implement best business practices associated with electronic STI life-cycle management.
• Promotes integration of the STI Program across the Department.

Summary

Based on the Departmental needs, the changing technology, the growing end-user expectations for full-text at the desktop, and budget restrictions, OSTI is proposing an aggressive timeline for the initial implementation of this concept. To meet that commitment, several factors must be addressed quickly and consensus reached by all parties involved. We will use all available resources in the near-term to identify and define a smooth transition plan. Through the STIP goal working groups, implementation guidelines will be created for the metadata record and electronic formats. STICG and other Headquarters forums will be used to notify the funding programs and to obtain buy-in on the role of the sites which create STI and the role of OSTI. The order and the guide will then document these agreed-upon change