AGENCYWIDE DOCUMENTS ACCESS AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (ADAMS) USER 

GROUP MEETING 

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 

2:00–3:00 p.m. 

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Headquarters 

Public Document Room O1-F21 

Agenda for ADAMS User Group Meeting #19 

1. General Announcements—Anna McGowan (2:00–2:05 p.m.) 

2. Member Issues and Questions—Anna McGowan (2:05–2:30 p.m.) 

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

4. Adjournment (3:00 p.m.) 

MEETING MINUTES 

1. General Announcements—Anna McGowan (2:00–2:05 p.m.) 

Anna McGowan opened the meeting at 2 p.m. She introduced the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory 

Commission (NRC) staff in attendance. Staff members from the Information and Records 

Services Division were: Karen Danoff, Adam Glazer, Patricia Hall, Mary Mendiola, 

Russ Nichols, Benjamin Partlow, Thomas Smith, Gary Young, and Sardar Zuberi. One public 

visitor was present. 

Attending through the telephone bridge were representatives from the following organizations: 

American Nuclear Society, AREVA, Bechtel, NAC International, Nuclear Energy Institute, Oak 

Ridge National Laboratory, Scientech, State of Tennessee, Westinghouse, and Winston and 

Strawn. 

Ms. McGowan stated that this was the nineteenth meeting of the Agencywide Documents 

Access and Management System (ADAMS) User Group (AUG). 

Minutes for previous AUG meetings are available for review on the AUG Web page at 

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/users-group.html, which is linked from the ADAMS main 

Internet page at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. The minutes of the current meeting 

will also be posted there. 
2. Member Issues and Questions—Anna McGowan (2:05–2:30 p.m.) 

Ms. McGowan answered the following questions, which had been submitted before the meeting: 

Q1: What is the rationale for having to put in “before” and “after” dates when you know the 

exact date of the document? Is there a way to just put in the actual date? 

A: Thank you for your question. The need to use the terms “Before” and “After” to specify a 

date is a requirement of the software that supports ADAMS PUBLIC. We have noted that 

everyone’s preference is to be able to enter an exact date as part of the search strategy and 

have passed that information along to the staff that is working on the Enterprise Content 

Management system for inclusion in the list of system requirements. Currently, an exact date in 

ADAMS PUBLIC cannot be entered without changing the program code. 

Q2: Using the * (asterisk) in content is confusing. The directions (in the user guide) for the 

Sample Searches say it must be used (page 2 of the Sample Search directions). However, it 

does search without using it, although in some cases, with different results. Using 

“groundwater*” got seven hits; using “groundwater” without the asterisk got twenty hits, but the 

document that I was looking for did not appear in the list of twenty but did appear in the list of 

seven. 

A: In this case, we are working within the requirements of the software that supports ADAMS 

PUBLIC. The NRC Public Document Room (PDR) staff has performed test searches using 

asterisks. Searches using the Content-based Criteria field in the ADAMS PUBLIC Library took 
several minutes to complete and yielded the same number of results for both “groundwater” and 

“groundwater*”, but no results for “*groundwater*”. 

Therefore, searches using the Title field for a keyword such as “groundwater” may be more 

efficient in the ADAMS PUBLIC Library; however, those terms will not find documents that have 

“groundwater” in the text. 

Test searches in the Title field alone, using asterisks, gave these results: 

Search Term Number of Documents Found 

groundwater 0 

groundwater* 57 

*groundwater* 1,848 

Using asterisks before and after the search term returns the most documents. Using an asterisk 

only after the search term will retrieve only documents whose titles start with that search term. 

If you have difficulty using asterisks in searching, please contact the PDR staff for help with 

search strategies and finding documents. 

Q3: In trying to find the author name, the drop-down menu doesn’t go past “Basso.” Even if 

you type in the first letter, e.g., “K” or “KL,” it doesn’t start with the “K”s. Instead, it starts at the 

“A” and only goes to “Basso.” How do you get to the other names? 

A: This is another feature of the ADAMS PUBLIC software; although drop-down menus appear 

for certain fields, they are nonfunctional because the software has an upper limit for the number 
of terms that the menu can include. The upper limit is not large enough to include all of the 

possible terms in many fields, so the drop-down box is misleading. It is necessary to enter the 

exact term that you wish to search rather than rely on the drop-down menu box. When you 

know the name for which you are searching, it is most effective to enter it rather than scroll 

through the limited menu. 

Q4: Sometimes when you execute a search, the PDF icon isn’t there. Not always, but several 

times I have gotten search results but no way to look at them because the PDF icon isn’t there. 

A: At the meeting, a user specified that she had also had this problem with documents in the 

ADAMS PUBLIC Library. This is probably caused by a system problem. If this happens 

another time, please try the search again, and the results should be more successful. 

If you were searching in the Public Legacy Library, full-text documents are rare because the 

Library contains citations to agency documents produced before the release of ADAMS in 2000. 

With the introduction of Web-based ADAMS, anyone could retrieve the full text of a document 

as well as the bibliographic information defining it. ADAMS now includes 10 years of full-text 

documents, but the Public Legacy Library has records from a period of 20 years, most of which 

are not available in full text. The Public Legacy Library is a static database with limited full-text 

documents. 
Q5: I suggest cutting down on the number of monthly/year folders kept. 

A: Thank you for your suggestion. Other users have indicated that they find these folders 

useful for their work, but if this is no longer true, then we would like to know if there is a folder 

structure or a span of dates for folders that you would recommend. At the meeting, a user did 

confirm that the existing folder structure is useful. 

Q6: Another suggestion is keeping package contents together. Several times one part of the 

package is near the beginning of the folder with no indication that it is part of a package; the 

entire package is perhaps several pages later because of the alphabetical listing. 

A: Thank you for this suggestion; however, this is not necessarily controlled by the agency. 

Packages may be compiled from documents submitted at different times, and thus can be 

separated in the system. We will take this suggestion into consideration for future use. 

Q7: Does NRC keep track of the instances when the PDF document fails to open? What have 

users noticed regarding this? 

A: Yes, we do keep track of instances when a PDF document fails to open. We usually learn 

about these instances from members of the public when they experience this problem. In those 

cases, we work with the users to provide the document to them in another way. We note the 

accession number in order to resolve the issue. The NRC often releases hundreds of full-text 

documents in the course of a day. Should you ever encounter this problem, please inform the 

PDR staff. The second question is open for discussion at this meeting. 
Q8: Will NRC discuss the input and output screens planned for ECM ADAMS? Is NRC 

soliciting “inside user staff” suggestions for such screens? 

A: The PDR staff is excellent about relaying any feedback about the system to the information 

technology (IT) staff and others who are developing the Enterprise Content Management 

system. Please feel free to send your comments and suggestions to them. When the 

Enterprise Content Management system is ready for demonstration, I am sure that the NRC will 

arrange opportunities for users to provide feedback about it. 

Q9: Are there any rules or requirements or suggestions for NRC staff to create packages? Do 

users have suggestions for worthwhile packages? Would NRC have the capability and 

resources to create such packages? 

A: I am not sure what the questioner means by “packages” in this instance. Packages have 

been part of ADAMS since its deployment in November 1999. The NRC staff prepares 

packages to bring together related documents so that they are easier to find for all ADAMS 

users. If any public users have any suggestions for package creation, we will consider them. 

The agency’s capability or resource availability to do this would depend on the exact nature of 

the suggestions. 

Q10: Can NRC say how it responded to OIG-07-A-16 (September 6, 2007)? Are there 

documents that are flagged for eventual public release? 
A: The agency has responded to the recommendations in the Office of the Inspector General’s 

report, and the responses are publicly available in ADAMS. Please see ADAMS Accession 

Nos. ML093521278, ML090920438, and ML083240421, for example. 

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

New Version of Web-Based PARS—Web-Based ADAMS 

Ms. McGowan said thanked attendees for their feedback to the agency about the recent 

difficulties in retrieving documents through Web-based Publicly Available Records System 

(PARS). The NRC is working closely with the agency IT staff to resolve these issues so that a 

user’s ability to retrieve documents is maintained. The NRC staff is currently developing the 

new interface for public access to ADAMS, which will replace both ADAMS PUBLIC and Webbased PARS, giving one system to search Public ADAMS. The NRC anticipates introducing the 

new interface this autumn; in the meantime, the agency appreciates feedback about ADAMS 

PUBLIC and Web-based PARS. 

ADAMS users were encouraged to provide feedback about the system to the PDR staff, who 

relay all comments to the IT staff and developers, in the form of a weekly report. 

Participants posed the following questions: 

Q1: Are there rules for NRC staff to create packages in ADAMS? The packages could be 

developed better. 
A: The author of a document is responsible for putting the package together. The NRC has 

internal guidance for this process. The new interface coming later this year will have easier 

searching capabilities, so that users can locate individual documents more easily. 

Q2: Will the current hyperlinks change? 

A: The developers have not yet informed us whether the current hyperlinks will change or 

remain the same. 

Q3: I don’t understand when to use asterisks. ADAMS PUBLIC is not easy to use. The user 

guide says you must use an asterisk. Perhaps the instructions should be expanded. 

A: We can look at the user guide instructions again to update or clarify them. Also, see 

Question 2 in Section 2 above. 

Q4: Why can’t we search by the exact date in ADAMS PUBLIC? 

A: The limitations of the software preclude searching by exact date; this software has more rigid 

searching requirements than Citrix did. We have informed the developers that searching by the 

exact date is an essential feature for the new system. 
Q5: I am thankful for the reports function. I generate more reports than before because I can’t 

depend on being able to download the documents. I would like to be able to save each 

document with its accession number as the title. ADAMS PUBLIC provides a default document 

title when saving, but it is not the document’s accession number. Also, the “save” feature before 

you open the document is not available in ADAMS PUBLIC. 

A: We will recommend that the new system include this feature. Currently, you can manually 

change the file name when you save it. 

Q6: Since the new system started (ADAMS PUBLIC), when I go in to look at inspection reports, 

I find that many more documents have been scanned in and they are not full-text searchable. I 

cannot copy and paste parts from these documents. Also, some of the new reactor COLAs 

(combined license applications) are this way. 

A: Please send a few representative accession numbers of these scanned documents to the 

PDR staff, and we will investigate. We can request that the documents be re-scanned so that 

they are searchable and text can be copied from them. 

Q7: Another issue is ADAMS PUBLIC timing out too quickly. It should remain open for 

30 minutes before timing out. 

A: We have had this problem in the past, and we reset the timeout duration. If you are using 

the system continuously, it will not time out. 
Q8: The ADAMS PUBLIC text search is still a problem. The text search “dies” when I am trying 

to use it—the system freezes. (The text search is the “content-based criteria” search for words 

or phrases, at the bottom of the search page.) 

A: This may be a limitation of the ADAMS PUBLIC software. 

Ms. McGowan thanked everyone for participating in the meeting and for their contributions. The 

next AUG meeting will take place in early November 2010 and will be announced through the 

AUG listserv and on the NRC Web site. 

4. Adjournment (3:00 p.m.)