INDUSTRY

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced that it has received $540,000 from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to investigate preservation and advanced access mechanisms to provide the American public with access to federal, presidential, and congressional electronic records. This research, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation's Shared Cyber Infrastructure Program, builds upon prior NARA support of $285,000 and will investigate the use of scientific data management tools and techniques to help NARA cope with the increasing flood of electronic records it must preserve, manage, and access. As the nation's recordkeeper, NARA's mission is to preserve and ensure access to authentic government records. These records are diverse, encompassing everything from reports and papers to photographs, maps, and blueprints, and are increasingly in a wide variety of electronic formats. Electronic records present an exceptional challenge because of their volume, growth rate, diversity, and complexity. For example, as a product of the 2000 census alone, NARA received 600 million electronic files of varying sizes, in varying formats. There is currently no single standardized system to preserve and access electronic records generated by the federal government over time. For help, and as part of its collaboration with the National Science Foundation, NARA turned to NCSA. The center has a long history as an international leader in handling the massive quantities of data produced by the scientific community that uses its supercomputers and is exploring the applicability of the techniques and tools employed to handle these scientific datasets for government records. "With electronic records collections the problems we face are recognized as a national challenge," said Robert Chadduck, research director for NARA's Electronic Records Archives program. "Understanding the efficient, effective management of these ever growing collections across multiple sites while ensuring that they remain accessible as formats and computing systems evolve is crucial. NCSA is a key research partner as we meet these challenges." NCSA will help identify and assess relevant technologies and techniques for handling the many types of electronic records and files, and for enabling ready access to these collections. "NARA is really a very active place," explained Michael Folk, a research scientist at NCSA working on the geospatial data project. "It's not a musty old place. The technology to enable access and to understand complex scientific data and electronic records is a big part of what we do, and it's where we can really help." The projects being funded by NARA focus on three broad areas in which NCSA has unique expertise and cutting-edge experience: visualization and analysis, data management, and performance measurements. Some of the projects undertaken at NCSA will study the application of advanced visualization, knowledge management, and automated extraction technologies to retrieve and analyze archival information, visualization as a tool to confirm the presence of relationships in very large, complex and rapidly growing collections, the potential use of scientific data modeling and storage technologies for preserving, managing, and accessing federal electronic records, and the profusion of formats in which records are created, managed, and stored. NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent Federal agency that preserves our nation's history and defines us as a people by overseeing the management of all Federal records. The National Archives is a public trust on which our democracy depends. We enable people to inspect for themselves the record of what government has done. We enable officials and agencies to review their actions and help citizens hold them accountable. We ensure continuing access to essential evidence that documents the rights of American citizens, the actions of federal officials and the national experience. For more information about NARA, see http://www.archives.gov/. For more information about the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Program see http://www.archives.gov/electronic_records_archives/. For more information: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/NARA/