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About CENDI — Highlights from FY 1999

MEMBERSHIP GROWS TO 10 AGENCIES

The Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, joined CENDI this year bringing the total membership to a "Perfect 10."

FEDERAL STI LEADERSHIP AND FORUM FOR DISCUSSION

CENDI provided leadership in discussions of STI topics with over 36 outside organizations including agencies from all branches of the federal government, international organizations, academic institutions and commercial companies.

Dialogs were hosted with information communities outside of the federal STI community to identify issues in information management futures:

• CENDI sponsored a session at the NFAIS Annual Meeting. The program included presentations on machine translation, the National Biological Information Infrastructure project, and NLM’s Visible Human Project.
• CENDI held two sessions at GovTechNet ’99, a joint conference sponsored by AFCEA and Federal Computer Week.

CENDI took a leadership role in the area of copyright. Based on its analysis of the operational issues that copyright raises for CENDI members, CENDI was asked to participate in the Federal Library and Information Center Committee General Counsel’s Copyright Forum.

The Executive Director and several CENDI members participated in a National Academy of Sciences workshop on "Promoting Access to Scientific and Technical Data for the Pubic Interest: An Assessment of Policy Option.s"

 JOINT PROJECTS AND TECHNICAL COOPERATION

Pilot projects helped to advance CENDI as a backbone for a virtual/digital library for government scientific and technical information.

• The Digital Library Initiatives Report, completed in 1999, will serve as a baseline for future developments.
• The aim of the Interagency Digital Library for Science and Engineering (IDLSE) Pilot Project was to use existing technology (Broadsword from the Air Force) to quickly pilot a multi-agency virtual library. DOE, NLE, and DTIC participated in the pilot. The IDLSE pilot showed that the technology could be used to search across heterogeneous databases, but that there are technical and administrative issues that need to be overcome.

STI EDUCATION AND INFORMATION LITERACY

The CENDI Web site was enhanced during 1999. The STI Manager now has 150 evaluated and fully cataloged links related to STI policy, information life cycle management, standards, etc.

CENDI Working Groups provided educational opportunities for cataloging and indexing staff to improve their understanding of metadata developments. Based on the Metadata Initiatives Workshop held in 1997, the Cataloging Working Group produced a crosswalk of the metadata elements use by the agencies to document non-traditional products such as educational curriculum and images.

The Cataloging Working Group and the Subject Analysis and Retrieval Working Group jointly sponsored a conference on Controlled Vocabulary and the Internet at the National Library of Medicine which was attended by over 175 people.