NCLIS to Assess U.S. Information
Dissemination
At the request of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) has launched a major study to recommend reforms to the federal government’s public-information dissemination machinery.
The project stems from NCLIS’s earlier work regarding the Department of Commerce’s August 1999 proposal to shut down the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and transfer its functions and collections to the Library of Congress. After holding three public meetings on the proposed closure, NCLIS submitted a preliminary-assessment report to the president and Congress in March recommending that NTIS be temporarily retained in the Department of Commerce, providing a minimal level of service until the issues could be studied more thoroughly by the commission.
On June 12 the committee asked NCLIS to continue the study, requesting that the commission “provide recommendations on the future of NTIS” that “would be consistent with any overall federal government information dissemination recommendations that you would also provide.” The commission hopes to deliver its final report on December 15.
Posted July 10, 2000.
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