AGENCYWIDE DOCUMENTS ACCESS AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (ADAMS) USER 

GROUP MEETING 

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 

2–3 p.m. 

NRC Headquarters 

Public Document Room O1-F21 

Agenda for ADAMS User Group Meeting #17

1. General Announcements—Anna McGowan (2–2:05 p.m.) 

2. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Status Briefing—Gary Young (2:05–2:30 

p.m.) 

3. Member Issues and Questions—Anna McGowan (2:30–2:45 p.m.) 

4. New Business or Questions—Anna McGowan (2:45–2:55 p.m.) 

5. Adjournment (3:00 pm) 
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MEETING MINUTES

1. General Announcements—Anna McGowan (2–2:05 p.m.) 

Anna McGowan opened the meeting at 2 p.m. She introduced the staff present in the meeting 

room. All staff were from the Information and Records Services Division (IRSD). They were: 

Gary Young, Tom Smith, James Baughman, Elizabeth Deahl, Margie Janney, Mike Collins, 

Dean Martin, and Joseph Holonich (Director, IRSD). 

On the telephone bridge were representatives from the following organizations: Bechtel, 

Deloitte Consulting LLP, Mitsubishi Nuclear Energy Systems, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), 

Progress Energy, Scientech, STARS, Westinghouse, and Winston and Strawn. 

The minutes of previous ADAMS User Group (AUG) meetings are posted on the AUG Web 

page on the NRC Web site at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/users-group.html. The 

minutes of the current meeting will also be available there. 

Ms. McGowan mentioned that ADAMS will mark its tenth anniversary in November 2009, and 

there may be a celebration to mark this milestone. She also gave advance notice that there will 

soon be a new tool in ADAMS to help in working with combined license application documents. 

The documents manager will have a new set of folders, organized by power plant name, which 

will contain the documents for the combined license applications for new nuclear plants. The 

ADAMS staff is currently working on making the links within these folders active so that these 

folders will soon be functional. 

Ms. McGowan introduced Gary Young, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) coordinator. 

2. ECM Status Briefing – Gary Young (2:05 – 2:30 pm) 

Gary Young stated that he has been working on current ADAMS for most of his NRC career and 

is now incorporating that experience into his work on the Enterprise Content Management 

system (ECM). ECM is designed to satisfy broader content management needs of the agency 

as well as serve as a document management system. 

There will be a three-phased approach in rolling out ECM, which may be affected by budgetary 

constraints. Phase 1 will occur over 1 year during which ADAMS software will be upgraded 

from the existing FileNet software to IBM P8. The new software will support an improved 

search interface as well as improved search functionality. It will also incorporate use of an 

agency taxonomy. 

 

Phase 2 will be implemented 6 months to 2 years after Phase 1. All of the numerous existing 

ADAMS-reliant systems will be moved to the new platform which will support a universal search 

feature to allow searching across files. 

 

Phase 3 will be the operational maintenance phase and will support automated workloads. 

Tom Smith reminded participants that the Citrix-based ADAMS search engine is nearly 10 years 

old, and Web-based PARS (Publicly Available Records System) was introduced in 2003. Public 

users will be included in the beta-testing of ECM. 
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3. Member Issues and Questions—Anna McGowan (2:30–2:45 pm) 

Q1: Will you be scrapping the Citrix interface? 

A: The new ADAMS interface will only be Web based. 

Q2: Will the new interface rely on plug-ins? 

A: No, it will not. 

Q3: Will it be operational within a year? 

A: We will start the roll-out and the beta-testing in about 1 year. 

Q4: How will Citrix Legacy be treated? Will it be a separate library? 

A: Legacy will be part of the roll-out. With the new search interface, you won’t have to search 

Legacy as a separate library; you will be able to search across files. 

Q5: Will we have access to all of the content? 

A: Yes, there will be one front-end search for all ADAMS libraries. You will be able to search 

for the Legacy content (microfiche records). The focus of Phase 1 is to stabilize and solidify the 

ADAMS infrastructure. Search enhancements will come in the later phases. 

Q6: In Citrix, it makes a difference when you search by “text contains” versus by the title. 

A: The new search will be more user-friendly; there will be more flexibility in creating search 

strategies. 

4. New Business or Questions—Anna McGowan (2:45–2:55 p.m.) 

Anna McGowan discussed the ADAMS problems that users have reported. 

• In Citrix-based ADAMS, users were getting a display of green text on a black screen. This 

has been corrected. It was a problem with the Adobe Acrobat setting. 

• Users were not able to display text files in Web-based ADAMS. This was a temporary 

problem that was resolved. A meeting attendee from the public stated that some 

documents are still not able to be opened in Web-based ADAMS. Ms. McGowan asked 

the user to send the accession numbers to the PDR staff and these documents will be 

checked. 

• There was a question regarding the practice for how titles are created for ADAMS 

documents. Documents are added to ADAMS by agency staff from all offices using a 

standard indexing template. The template uses a “naming convention” regardless of who 

adds the document to ADAMS. For further information about a document, users can 

check the document’s profile, which provides the identifying information about every 

ADAMS record, including the document type. Any questions on document titles can be 

sent to the PDR staff. 

Ms. McGowan asked if the participants had any additional questions. 
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Q1: We sent a document to the NRC through the Electronic Information Exchange (EIE), and 

the document we submitted was printed out, marked up, and scanned. Is that normally done? 

A: Documents received through the EIE are processed for ADAMS by staff in different NRC 

offices. Some staff do not have the capability to annotate the document electronically before 

sending it to the Document Processing Center (DPC). 

Q2: I am still having a problem with getting “Technicolor documents” in Citrix ADAMS. It is not 

predictable. I get all sorts of colors and then black lines on the screen. 

A: We will follow up and address this issue. 

Q3: What is the status of the ADAMS system notice on the NRC Web site? What exactly was 

wrong? Can we expect more intermittent problems? 

A: The message was posted in response to questions about numerous miscellaneous 

problems reported by users with ADAMS during the past few weeks. Since the problems were 

resolved at different times, it was more practical to post the notice and leave it there until the 

PDR staff members were confident that the various problems had been resolved. 

 

Q4: There seems to be a “Chinese wall” between the ADAMS IT staff and the PDR staff. It 

would be nice to have the ADAMS IT people come and listen to the public at the AUG meetings. 

There are the same problems every time there is an upgrade. Now there will be the biggest 

upgrade. 

A: The ADAMS IT staff has contributed to the content presented at previous AUG meetings. 

We will ask them to attend future AUG meetings when necessary. 

Q5: Why should we report ADAMS technical problems to the PDR? Why isn’t diagnostic 

testing done? 

A: By reporting ADAMS technical problems to the PDR, the staff knows how widespread the 

problem is and if it duplicates problems already reported. The PDR staff performs a daily 

diagnostic test of ADAMS early every morning and reports any identified problems to the IT 

staff. The PDR staff use these reports to serve as advocates for the public ADAMS users. 

Q6: Currently, the public is not able to see titles of proprietary documents. Will we be able to 

see nonpublic document titles in the new version? 

A: There will be no initial changes to current procedures in the new system; PDR staff will 

continue to inform the public to follow the established Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 

process to respond to requests for access to nonpublic documents. 

Q7: Will the new system be called ADAMS? 

A: The new name will also be ADAMS, as far as we know. 

Anna McGowan stated that the next ADAMS User Group Meeting will be in November 2009, 

and that participants may contact her, or the PDR staff, with any questions. They should send 

any agenda items for the next meeting to AUG.resource@nrc.gov . Ms. McGowan thanked 

everyone for participating in the meeting. 
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5. Adjournment (3 pm)