---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 10:31:32 -0700
From: [log in to unmask]
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: NTIS (fwd)

     VH: Finally! A voice of rebellion!  I couldn't agree more with your
     assertion that in the rush to load the web, etc. with all these
     papers, THE ALL IMPORTANT RETRIEVAL MECHANISMS ARE NOT IN PLACE! NOR
     WILL THEY LIKELY EVER BE! (geez that felt good to say; sorry for all
     the exclamation points... nothing like real tacky punctuation to get
     the point across, eh?)  The idiotic bureaucrats don't seem to
     understand this. I suggest we task these policy makers/bean counters
     with a bibliography of say ten recent papers and have them find them
     using all the common search engines.  This is what we - the
     information retrieval specialists - will be stuck trying to do after
     these federal bureaucrats blow off the information seekers with their
     crackpot web-based (or whatever else is out there) repositories.
     Can't thank you enough for bringing up this issue.

     - Paul Leverenz
       SIO Library


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: NTIS (fwd)
Author:  Maps and Air Photo Systems Forum <[log in to unmask]> at {ucsdhub}
Date:    8/16/99 11:34 AM


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 09:16:21 -0700
From: Virginia R. Hetrick <[log in to unmask]>
To: Maps and Air Photo Systems Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: NTIS

One thing that might be a consideration as far as the NTIS closing would
be a change to its core function.  Even though the agencies are putting
their reports on the Internet, the titles of the reports and lack of
"real world" keywords seems to me to be a serious problem since the
customer set still has a substantial difficulty finding these documents
amongst the gazillions of pages on the Internet.

It would be a genuine service to have a single source where ALL
published (online or onpaper) documents from the Feds as well as reports
from grant and contract awardees would be indexed.

Your thoughts?

vh
--
\ /  Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California
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