Please excuse any cross-postings.

The White House released the Networking and Information Technology Research
and Development (NITRD) Program Supplement to the President’s Budget for FY
2014 on Friday, May 17, 2013.

The full document can be found at this URL:
http://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/2014supplement/FY2014NITRDSupplement.pdf.


What follows are some of the highlights from this document as they relate
to archives and records management:

Most archives and records management activities are listed under the Human
Computer Interaction & Information Management (HCI&IM) Program Component
Area (PCA) (pp. 9, 34-37). “HCI&IM research spans both the technologies
that enable people to access and use digital information (HCI) and those
that expand the capabilities of computing systems and devices to acquire,
store, process, and make accessible data and information for humans to use
(IM). As exemplified in the National Big Data R&D Initiative launched in
March 2012, transformative approaches for accessing and extracting meaning
from data has become a critical need because the volume, variety, and
velocity of data are quickly overtaking the technical capabilities to
process, manage, and analyze it.  The Federal Government generates and
maintains the world’s largest digital collections of science and
engineering data, historical records, health information, and scientific
and other types of archival literature. Rapid knowledge discovery requires
next-generation methods, technologies, and tools that integrate and
efficiently manage massive stores of streaming, distributed, heterogeneous
information while integrating the human in the discovery process.” (pg. 34)

One of the strategic priorities of the HCI&IM PCA for FY 14 is:

Information infrastructure: A robust, resilient national digital data
framework for long-term preservation and accessibility of electronic
records as well as expanding data and records collections (pg. 35)



The National Archives and Records Admininstration (NARA) is specifically
mentioned as participating in the following areas of advanced research
during FY 14 (pp. 35-36):

From big data to new knowledge and action: Analysis R&D requires not only
new computing research in models, algorithms, and tools to accelerate
scientific discovery and productivity from heterogeneous, ultrascale data
stores, but also development of innovative, multidimensional approaches to
highly complex data. For complex data, new ways should be developed to
enable the intuitive display of complex interactions and mechanisms that
enhance both discovery and use of data, as well as effective analytical
products for decision makers and the public

Effective stewardship of science and engineering data: This effort will
maximize the value gained from current and previous federal investments but
will require additional research in providing for life-cycle stewardship
over time. Research foci include personalized access to information, as
well as federation, preservation, curation, data life-cycle stewardship,
and analysis of large, heterogeneous collections of scientific data,
information, and records. A persistent issue is the need for
fault-tolerant, scalable management of information input and output in
light of new system architectures

Information integration, accessibility, and management: Multiple advances
are required in technologies, system architectures, and tools for
optimized, scalable ingest and processing for high-capacity data
integration (especially of Geographic Information System (GIS) and
spatio-temporal data), management, exploitation, modeling, and analysis. In
addition, investigation continues in cloud-based infrastructures to
efficiently gain distributed access to data resources utilizing new
ontologies and metadata formats for discovery

Information search and retrieval: New research methods and tools are
necessary for evaluation and performance measures of information-discovery
technologies, as well as relevance feedback. Current focus areas include
legal discovery, recognition of opinion, and patent search, as well as
machine reading of records

Multimodal language recognition and translation: Improve multilingual
language technology performance in areas of speech-to-text transcription
and text-to-text transcription. A goal is to provide spontaneous two way
communications translation, machine reading, text retrieval, document
summarization/distillation, automatic content extraction, and speaker and
language recognition through multimodal interfaces



The Supplement also identifies a number of supporting collaborative
activities. NARA is identified as a participant in several of these
activities (pg. 36).

Information access, management, and preservation: Multiple agencies
participate in the IWG on Digital Data and the IWG on Public Access to
Scientific Publications. Topics of consideration include new policy
development and identification of existing standards for interoperability,
such as the Digital Preservation Interoperability Framework International
Standard (DPIF)

Foundations of visualization and analysis: This provides a multiagency
mechanism for coordination of research in feature extraction for anomaly
detection, integration of multiple types of data and records at scale or
format, the use of visualization as an interface, and biomedical imaging



The Supplement also provides, “a summary of individual agencies’ ongoing
programmatic interests for 2013 and 2014 under the HCI&IM PCA.” It lists
the following activities for NARA (pg. 37):

NARA: Global-scale capable, open source, “next generation” cloud
technologies architectures and services enabling effective sustainable
management, intellectual control, and access to nationally distributed
billion file and larger scale complex digital object collections



Mark Conrad
NARA Information Services/Applied Research
IXA
The National Archives and Records Administration
Erma Ora Byrd Conference and Learning Center
Building 494 Second Floor
610 State Route 956
Rocket Center, WV  26726

Phone: 304-726-7820
Fax: 304-726-7802
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Twitter: @lmc1990

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