An earlier version of the following document was submitted on 9/12/95 to David Lytel, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (dlytel@ostp.eop.gov), for a 1994-95 Accomplishment Report of the Information Infrastructure Task Force.
The University of California CD-ROM Information System, with 300 CD's (150 GB) on line, is the Internet's largest archive of public government data. It was begun in 1990 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with support from the Department of Energy (DOE). Other collaborators are the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the University of California Data Archive and Technical Assistance (UC DATA), and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) Library. The system was described in Merrill D, Parker N, Gey F and Stuber C. 1995; The University of California CD-ROM Information System; Communications of the ACM 38(4) pp.51-52 (1995); http://merrill.wwh.net/mdocs/cacm9504/final.html.
A Web-based interface to 1990 Census data, known as LOOKUP, was completed in August 1994. On June 21, 1995 Glenn Davis of InfiNet selected LOOKUP as the Web Site of the Day. In October 1995 LOOKUP serviced 240,000 URL requests from 22,000 different users; both figures are growing by 20 percent each month.
Usage is equally divided among (a) government (b) educational and (c) commercial users. Many unsolicited letters of praise have been received and are available. In 1995 the Bureau of the Census provided additional data access tools, including the U.S. Gazetteer and the TIGER Mapping Service (TMS). TMS users are requesting about 8000 maps per day, the maximum capacity of the server.
new in Sept-Nov 1995:
After 9/30/95, DOE support for Census-related activities at LBNL was discontinued. FY1996 support for LBNL was requested from the Bureau of the Census and the Government Printing Office (GPO); partial support was obtained from the Census Bureau. Support for UC DATA and the UCB Library, requested from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP), was not obtained.
Additional support from other agencies is urgently needed to preserve and disseminate the older data in LBNL's SEEDIS (Socio-Economic Environmental Demographic Information System). SEEDIS, representing 100 person-years of development effort in the 1970's and 1980's, includes about 100 databases, geographically integrated and with structured machine-readable documentation (metadata). Some of the older data in SEEDIS, including 1970 Census data, no longer exist elsewhere.
expected in FY1996:
In FY1996 the Census Bureau expects to integrate LOOKUP and other information services into a new Data Access and Dissemination System (DADS).
If FY1996 funding is received from the Census Bureau and GPO, LBNL will continue to maintain the CD-ROM system and centralized WWW documentation, until such time as the data are duplicated elsewhere. LBNL will provide advice and technical assistance to selected SDCs and Federal Depository Libraries who wish to make their data publicly available.
If additional funding is received from other sources, LBNL will preserve and document the data currently in SEEDIS and in the LBNL tape archive (about 80 GB total). Selected data will be copied to CD-ROM for public distribution on CD-ROM. LBNL will assist the Census Bureau and other agencies to integrate the SEEDIS databases and other data into DADS
UC DATA and the UCB library have plans and are currently seeking funding to expand the system to serve 280 California public libraries (through the info-people network) and up to 1 million URL requests per month by moving the data from CD-ROM to a mass storage system (MSS). SUN microsystems has donated the UCB Library a major server (2000 Enterprise system) on which to run it. UC DATA and the UCB Library hope to transfer the data to MSS, to expand access beyond the 1990 Census, to do SGML markup and search of the documentation, and to train librarians in using the system.
In October 1995 the Census Bureau joined the Federal Web Consortium organized by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). NCSA will develop tools, and the Consortium will promote shared Web sharing of major Federal databases. Discussion is continuing in a "Census Distrubuted Repository" HyperNews teleconference