April 29, 1998

Contact:
Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217

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Library of Congress and Information Handling Services Agree to Expand and Automate Technical Resources

The Library of Congress and Information Handling Services (IHS) recently concluded a memorandum of understanding that will result in the automation and expansion of technical information now available from the Library.

Under the terms of the new arrangement, the Technical Reports Section of the Library's Science and Technology Division will:

• Change all its standards and military data collections from the current film-based services to an electronic-delivery service. This will allow the collections to be available at selected networked locations within the Library.
• Receive on a continuing basis complete sets of its present subscription-based standards and military products generated by IHS on CD-ROM, as well as state-of-the-art computers, peripherals, software and network support, enabling the Technical Reports Section to distribute a large part of its standards collection electronically to Science Reading Room patrons.
• Reduce demands on staff resources for the physical delivery of these documents to the reading room; contribute to the integrity and preservation of the originals in the Library's custody; increase the protection and security of the standards collection; and further improve the Library's standards collection.

In addition, as part of this new partnership arrangement, the Library will assist IHS in its efforts to complete the new Science and Technology Division-produced GOST bibliographic database of Soviet and Russian standards, which will become part of the IHS Worldwide Standards (WWP) product line. This CD-ROM service contains bibliographic data on more than 300,000 standards from more than 440 standards organizations as well as scanned images of complete standards from more than 80 of the world's leading standards producers. The GOST standards will be a major enhancement to the WWP product, as they are critical to conducting business or trading with the former Soviet Union.

IHS specializes in providing engineering, technical and regulatory information published in a variety of media, from CD-ROM to the Internet and intranet, and has provided the Library with many of its U.S., foreign national and international standards collections in microform format for a number of years.

For more information about this new resource or any other questions regarding standards reference service, contact Jim Scala at (202) 707-1225 or John Feulner at (202) 707-1223.

 

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PR 98-062
4/29/98
ISSN 0731-3527