Will Clearinghouse Exist After All the Dust Clears? : Little-known collector of scientific data finds itself on the brink of extinction because of its own technical obsolescence.
At a time when access to the latest scientific and technical research is considered vital to America’s future, you might think the National Technical Information Service would be bustling.
Its mandate, after all, is “to collect and disseminate technical information produced by governments worldwide in order to increase U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.”
Yet the NTIS is dying on the vine, financially starved and itself technically obsolete. So far behind in the information revolution is it, for example, that many of the agency’s 2 million-plus documents are gathering dust on double-deck steel racks in a cavernous warehouse here, available to would-be users only after time-consuming manual retrieval and copying.
And the surprising plight of the NTIS is a small but pointed object lesson in some of the reasons the United States has trouble reaping the economic rewards of advanced research even though its scientists still lead the world in many fields.
Slumbering management, bureaucratic red tape and inertia and a financing system that, until recently, made it hard for the NTIS to finance badly needed modernization have brought the agency to the brink of extinction.
“The future of NTIS is in serious doubt,” warned Fred B. Wood, a senior associate at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, suggesting it could simply expire if its problems are not addressed.
Unique among federal agencies, NTIS gets by with no money from the taxpayers. For nearly half a century, the little-known arm of the Commerce Department has subsisted entirely on sales of scientific and technical reports, chiefly to private industry. For most of that time, any profits it earned had to be turned over to the Treasury instead of being plowed back into modernization.
There is also the inertia problem:
NTIS’ primary task is to collect and disseminate the results of research done under contract to such government agencies as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pentagon and the Energy and Transportation departments. (NTIS does not deal with research funded by federal grants, which are typically published in widely disseminated professional journals.) But agencies are not required to provide the clearinghouse with reports on their research contracts; it’s purely voluntary.
“They don’t have to give us anything,” said Joseph Clark, deputy director. And many agencies apparently make little effort to do so. The number of titles NTIS receives has steadily dropped. It acquired 79,471 federal reports in 1983; last year, the number fell to 49,058.
This at a time when R&D; funding continues to grow, with the volume of scientific and technical information increasing at a 13% annual rate, doubling every 5 1/2 years.
As a result, NTIS does not always have what its customers want, forcing those who might put the research to broader use to go hunting through the bureaucratic jungles themselves.
The kind of research NTIS collects and distributes typically pertains to narrow fields of applied research and engineering. It can be “so esoteric as to be of interest to only three or four people,” concedes NTIS director Joseph F. Caponio.
A “bestseller” for NTIS is one that sells 10 or 20 copies. Only 15% sell more than five. Electronic sales are its only growing and profitable “product line,” accounting for 25% of NTIS’ revenues.
Esoteric as the material may be, it is considered potentially important for a wide variety of customers. “The agency would be greatly missed, and we must not let that happen,” said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N. Y.), a member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
NTIS has published a “strategic” survival plan that includes rapid modernization and candidly declares: “The U.S. has had no coordinated and effective method for collecting, evaluating and distributing (R&D;) information. . . . “
“But there’s just no way of predicting” whether the plan will work,” Caponio said. “Information is such an intangible product.”
