Documents On-Line at Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Hilary D. Burton

On February 1, 1995, the Technical Information Department at Lawrence Livermore National Lab put in place the infrastructure to support electronic submission, review and release, and automatic library archiving for Laboratory-authored unclassified and unlimited technical reports. The system involves the circulation of the full text of the reports to the various reviewing units (e.g. classification and patent review) through the final approval where the document is then converted into the Adobe Acrobat portable document format (pdf), linked to the appropriate bibliographic citation information and ftp'd to the library. Once received by the Library, the citation information is reviewed, converted to the Library's internal database format, and added to the on-line public access catalog. Simultaneously, the full text of the report is sent to a web server where the citation information and full text are linked and the information updates the web server, making the information available Lab-wide for retrieval, local printing, or for generating custom print plant orders via the server.

Although the web server is currently available only to LLNL ip addresses, it is planned to make the database available over the Internet once certain access questions are resolved. In parallel with the electronic capture and processing procedures, the Library is undertaking a retrospective scanning operation which will eventually process the 65,000+ unclassified reports currently available only through the Lab's Technical Reports Library which is located in a classified area, severely limiting staff access to this valuable material. The availability of this information in full text to the desk top of each Lab scientist should substantially increase the value of this resource. Also, since users will be able to print on demand just what they need, we expect a reduction in storage space and inventory costs.

The technological components selected for this project were chosen with the objective of supporting open systems, accepted standards, and heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. Because the Lab does not have a single standard for authoring software, nor is there any standard hardware configuration - although the bulk of the Lab is either Mac or Unix-based - we looked for solutions which would provide us with maximum flexibility. The combination of the Web and Acrobat gave us powerful solutions to several of our requirements. As with many similar programs, we found that many of the questions encountered during this effort were not technical problems but organizational and/or people issues. This project represented a major change in procedure for several groups which were not computer-oriented initially and thus had to make a much greater transition than was comfortable. However, it was generally felt that we would learn much from addressing the various issues raised by electronic information creation, dissemination, and retrieval while dealing with a file for which there were no copyright restrictions. Integrating electronic resources in the broader environment where intellectual property considerations are complex and distributed becomes much more challenging.

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