Welcome

The Fire and Building Educational Resource Collection (FABERC, pronounced “Fabric”) is a portal for the fire science community. FABERC provides access to multimedia – including video clips, images, reports, and, experiment data – from a variety of sources. A calendar of upcoming events is also available.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Building and Fire Research Laboratory (NIST/BFRL) have formed a partnership to create this digital library, which consists of an online collection of resources that are pertinent to the fire science and related building fields and are accessible through a central portal. No single entity “owns” FABERC; rather, this portal serves as a clearinghouse or collection of collections, with many and varied contributors (including the Society of Fire Protection Engineers) developing, contributing, and maintaining their own collections, each of which is accessible and searchable under the FABERC umbrella. Some information will be freely available and some organizations may charge a fee to download specified reports, statistics, journal articles, etc. FABERC will lead the user to appropriate information of which the user might not otherwise be aware.

In addition to various multimedia resources, including virtual reality depictions of sprinklers, video clips, and articles and documents from NIST/BFRL, ongoing tasks include the creation of phenomenological and visual tools for experimental data and the addition of new data and experiments to expand available content through a related fire experiment database. We are currently cataloging existing resources; developing, testing, and publishing the portal; assessing project outcomes; and creating awareness of project.