The Paper Chase

Although the National Technical Information Service is the largest agency collecting and disseminating scientific and other technical information for the government, it isn't the only one. Another agency filling a similar role is the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), an arm of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Like NTIS, the center holds research and development reports and other collections of documents, but unlike NTIS, the center's primary audience is the internal Defense Department military, civilian and contractor communities. DTIC makes some of its documents-those unclassified and not restricted from public distribution for copyright, Freedom of Information Act or other reasons-available through NTIS.

Also like NTIS, the center has experienced the transition from documents in paper form to electronic form but doesn't believe hard-copy publishing has become obsolete.

"It's my belief that particularly with technical reports and large documents, people don't like to read them online. A lot of people also don't have the capability," says Kurt N. Molholm, administrator of DTIC.

"We don't get rid of things because we don't know its value in 20 or 30 years," he adds. "Ten to 20 percent of the requests we have are for very old documents. It's a fallacy to think that there are that many documents available electronically. There are a lot of references to documents, but by and large, most documents are still not in electronic form."

Also like NTIS, the center acts as a franchise agent, hosting about 100 DoD Web sites, including the central DefenseLink site.

"We have the same type of challenge. We are a content information provider, we are not a technology organization," Molholm says. "We know how to present information. These organizations come to us because of our ability to relate with users and content as opposed to just using technology. It's the same thing with NTIS. We saw in DTIC early on that we had an information infrastructure that with a marginal increase you could serve a larger community."

For several years in the early 1990s DTIC was required to be self-funding-much as NTIS is required to be today-but that restriction was lifted because of a view that cost of information should not become a barrier to its being shared within the Defense community. And there is no talk at the parent agency level of closing DTIC.

"The difference is by and large Commerce doesn't use NTIS as an organization to use its own science," Molholm says. "The Department of Defense uses DTIC to improve the productivity of its scientists. They see the advantage of that, and I don't think Commerce saw that with NTIS."

"My concern with the closure of NTIS that's being talked about is how quickly it's done," he adds. "I can see in four or five or six years where you have better search mechanisms and better ways of finding information, maybe there's a changing role. But you don't take a portion of a system out and think that everything's working together. NTIS is part of a system; it's not a stand-alone entity.

"I don't want to be in the position of having to fulfill requests for printed documents for the rest of the world. We certainly aren't funded to do that. We do that for our own customers within the Department of Defense, Energy does it for its customers, NASA does it for its, but NTIS is the only one that does it for everybody."