INFORMATION CENTERS
Sharing Scientific Data

Forty years ago, then ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg headed a presidential panel to study the problem of handling rapidly growing amounts of data. The panel recommended the creation of specialized information centers to review, analyze, condense, and interpret scientific literature for the scientific community.

In response to the Weinberg report, Science, Government, and Information, the Radiation Shielding Information Center was established in 1963. In 1996 it morphed into the Radiation Safety Information Computational Center to reflect the scope of technical coverage and keep up with changing computational technology. For scientists and educators in 73 countries, the center has collected, tested, packaged, and disseminated 1600 computational tools used in radiation shielding, transport, and protection.

Since its founding in 1963, the Controlled Fusion Atomic Data Center has made available atomic, molecular, and particle-solid collision data of interest to fusion energy and plasma research. The center has provided valuable data from ORNL's electron-cyclotron-resonance ion source to national fusion research centers at ORNL, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and General Atomics and has participated in the International Atomic Energy Agency's Data Center Network.

Since the early 1960s, numerous other ORNL information centers have come and gone. They have covered ecological sciences, health and environmental effects of toxic chemicals, nuclear data, nuclear safety, and remedial action programs.

The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), established in 1982 at ORNL, is the Department of Energy's primary center for global-change data. CDIAC's accurate, impartial data are used by a diverse group of clients. The center's greatest moment of international impact came in the run-up to the 1997 Kyoto conference, when countries negotiated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. CDIAC provided its unique database of country-by-country, year-by-year emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel combustion to representatives of many countries, as well as to the news media and a variety of nongovernmental organizations.

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