About CENDI — Highlights from FY 2000
CENDI HAS DEFINED A NEW STRATEGIC GOAL: Establish A Strategic Planning Process That Provides Direction To Meet The CENDI Vision
In order to facilitate both the strategic planning processes of the agencies and CENDI itself, the individual agencies gave presentations on their strategic planning process followed by identifying the main themes and issues in common across the agencies.
COORDINATION AND LEADERSHIP FOR INFORMATION EXCHANGE ON IMPORTANT STI ISSUES CONTINUES
During FY00, CENDI had contact with over 84 other organizations. These included agencies from all branches of the federal government, international organizations, academic institutions, and commercial companies.
CENDI has kept issues such as digital copyright, database protection, digital object identifiers, and information security to the forefront of the information communities by continued networking with FLICC, CNI, ICSTI, NFAIS, and key staff within the CENDI agencies.
At the request of Tom Kalil of the National Economic Council, the Secretariat prepared a paper on the impact of the recommended closure of NTIS on Federal agencies and on public access to federal information. This was then used in various briefings and by the National Commission for Libraries and Information Services (NCLIS) in developing its report recommendations.
CENDI sponsored discussions during the year with NFAIS on the role of the government versus the private sector in information dissemination. CENDI’s thrust was on the diversity of the organizations involved and the various constituencies and missions of the agencies, emphasizing the fact that the government STI programs are not a single entity.
In regard to the Data Community, the Secretariat Director of CENDI was named an ex officio member of the U.S. National Commission on Data (CODATA). Discussions were held with CODATA concerning a new International STI Roundtable to bring together representatives from various communities to address international STI issues.
Other CENDI activities included:
- Metrics and Evaluation. A task group was established to focus on Web-usage metrics and evaluation of customer satisfaction of Web-based products and services. The group found that all agencies are using Web-usage metrics and that this technology, while not consistently defined, is well established. However, there is no common understanding of customer satisfaction evaluation methods.
- Copyright and Intellectual Property. The CENDI Copyright Task Group, formed in 1998, has helped to establish a leadership role for CENDI in the area of copyright and intellectual property. CENDI has been participating in the FLICC General Counsel’s Copyright Forum. Work on the Frequently Asked Questions document was completed during this year. The document addresses traditional copyright (the government as user, author, and publisher) and issues related to copyright on the Internet.
- Digital Electronic Archiving. A task group was established to follow the government’s role in digital archiving.
- Reference Linking. A workshop was jointly sponsored by the Federal Library and Information Center Committee and CENDI entitled "Reference Linking and Citations: The Federal Perspective" to discuss the issues related to reference linking and digital object identification. The workshop had excellent attendance by representatives from CENDI member agencies and governmental and institutional representatives outside CENDI.
CENDI ENVISIONS AND CONTINUES TO DEFINE AN ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK FOR A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR THE FEDERAL STI COMMUNITY.
In order to proceed on the development of a framework for the development of future STI architectures, emphasis was placed on providing discussion and educational opportunities in this area. Various components of the architectural framework were the focus of the technical sessions during FY00, including telecommunications, Internet technologies, advanced search features, security, and new models for scientific communication/publishing. To help CENDI meet this goal, the following are some of the actions undertaken the past year:
- Since security is a key component in an STI architecture, a working group on IT Security was created in FY00.
- CENDI began work on a reference model for scientific and technical information in the federal government context.
CENDI CONTINUES TO PROMOTE AN UNDERSTANDING OF STI AND STI MANAGEMENT BY PROVIDING VARIOUS EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES AND VENUES.
CENDI has made it an important goal to provide educational opportunities for agency staff to address issues of common interest in addition to developing educational tools that describe the directions and capabilities of CENDI agencies and the benefits of the joint enterprise. One of the major methods of reaching this goal is through the CENDI Web site:
- The CENDI Web site has been redesigned to provide a more modern look with the content emphasis being more topical rather than organizational. CENDI projects are described with links as appropriate to the resulting publications, workshop agenda, etc.
- The STI Manager now has approximately 190 evaluated and fully cataloged links related to STI policy, information life cycle management, standards, etc.
Another method of achieving this goal was arranging for and encouraging wide agency participation in field trips to a number of CENDI-member agencies. During FY00, CENDI sponsored tours of the National Library of Education, the Defense Technical Information Center and the National Agricultural Library.
