National Technical Information Service

NTIS

National Technical Information Service

• National Technical Information Service (NTIS), United States Department of Commerce

• Established 1945 to collect and provide permanent access to nation’s scientific, technical, engineering and business information and to collect related international information

National Technical Information Service

• Facilitates perpetual public access to Federal information in various formats

• Assists federal agency compliance with transferring their government information to NTIS under the American Technology Pre-eminence Act (ATPA).

• ATPA Requires Federal Agencies to transfer their Scientific, Technical, and Engineering Information (STEI) to the National Technical Information Service

• Develops bibliographic records to aid find-ability

• Maintains a permanent repository of unclassified scientific, technical, engineering, and business information

• Collects and disseminates information worldwide • Provides customized information services to other agencies

General Trends in Dissemination of Physical Media

National Technical Information Service

The Collection

National Technical Information Service

Total Documents

Customer Feedback

Strengths:• The NTIS database is focused on government technical reports.• The NTIS database is big and covers lots of years • Consistent metadata over a long period of time• Customer recognition with major commercial suppliers

Concerns:• Collection is not completely digital• Customer confusion about the NTIS role in S&T• Source agency confusion about NTIS value to them

National Technical Information Service

Observations

National Technical Information Service

• Core customers are academic and government libraries.

• Customers are intermediaries not end-users.

• Print and PDF orders are mostly corporate.

• Customers know who we are.

• Librarians do not generally collect technical reports, but value them highly.

• Librarians value comprehensive coverage.

• Sources of reports need to be recognized.

• Value of the collection is far greater than the value of the document.

The Big Goal

National Technical Information Service

NTIS will be recognized by the technical information community

as the leader in must-have government scientific, technical,

and engineering content and services with easy to use access, search, discovery, and retrieval

tools in a collaborative environment.

Big Objectives

National Technical Information Service

• Build a resource for scientific discovery.

• Ensure that NTIS content is accessible and usable to the widest possible audience.

• Provide focus to the NTIS content acquisition and preservation strategy.

• Create a value proposition that encourages Federal Agency participation.

Step 1: National Technical Report Library

• Access to bibliographic records plus full text content from the desktop

• Broader dissemination possible

• Subject matter exposure

• Focus on timeliness, comprehensiveness and current awareness

• Higher value to source agencies

• Values the collection as greater than the sum of the documents

• Subscription based access to library functions

• Free search of titles from NTIS website

National Technical Information Service

The Office of Product and Program Development

703-605-6142

Don Hagen

dhagn@ntis.gov

For more information, please contact

National Technical Information Service