June 30, 2014

MEMORANDUM TO: File

FROM: Anna Therese McGowan, Chief /RA/

 User Service Branch

 Customer Service Division

 Office of Information Services

SUBJECT: ADAMS PUBLIC USER GROUP MEETING MINUTES, MAY 14, 2014

This memo accompanies the summary of the public meeting held on Wednesday, May 14, 

2014, in the Public Document Room of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This was the 

27

th meeting of the ADAMS User Group.
AGENCYWIDE DOCUMENTS ACCESS AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (ADAMS) USER 

GROUP MEETING

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

2:00 PM–3:00 PM

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Headquarters

Public Document Room O1-F21

Agenda for ADAMS User Group Meeting #27

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

2. Member Issues and Questions—Anna McGowan (2:05–2:25 PM)

3. New Business or Questions—Anna McGowan (2:25–2:35 PM)

4. Adjournment (2:35 PM)
MEETING MINUTES

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

Anna McGowan, Chief, User Services Branch, Office of Information Services, opened the 

meeting at 2 p.m. She introduced the other U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff in 

attendance. Staff members from the Office of Information Services (OIS), Customer Service 

Division (CSD), were Mary Mendiola, Jo Ann Resner and Sardar Zuberi. Other OIS staff 

members were Grace Canty, Roy Choudhury, and Dean Martin.

Representatives from the following organizations used the telephone bridge to participate in the 

meeting: AREVA, Comanche Peak, General Electric-Hitachi, and Westinghouse.

Minutes for ADAMS User Group (AUG) meetings are available for review on the NRC’s

AUG Web page, which is accessible from the Web-based ADAMS (WBA) page.

Anna McGowan discussed the following issues and questions, which had been received 

through the AUG distribution list prior to the meeting. 

2. Member Issues and Questions—Anna McGowan (2:05–2:25 PM)

Q1: Is there a possibility of more report options or any on-screen description changes for Webbased ADAMS (WBA)?

A1: At this time, there are no plans to add any additional report options or make any on-screen 

description changes to WBA. If there are additional reports that you would like to recommend, 

please send an e-mail message to the PDR.Resource@nrc.gov mailbox, and we will share your 

recommendation with the technical staff. The current budget status of the NRC does not look 

very hopeful for funding any major programming changes to the current version of WBA.

Q2: Can you tell me about meeting summaries and packages in ADAMS?

A2: Meeting summaries are not handled by the staff of the Public Document Room (PDR); they 

are usually prepared by the meeting sponsors. The only exception is that the staff of the PDR 

compiles the ADAMS meeting minutes, posts them on the NRC’s Web site for public access, 

and adds them to ADAMS. All other NRC public meeting summaries are prepared by the staff 

of the offices or regions involved in the meetings. Similarly, the document owners are the staff 

who determine what is placed in a package or whether a package is needed for the collection of 

documents.

Q3: Any upcoming changes to WBA?
A3: No, there are no planned changes to WBA. Please submit any recommendations for 

system changes, and we will ask the technical staff to review them and see if they could be 

incorporated into a future version of WBA.

Q4: Can you tell me about title profiling?

A4: The profiling of ADAMS documents is first completed by the author of the document; he or 

she defines the title and the other properties of the document when it is entered into ADAMS. 

The staff of the Document Processing Center profiles the document in accordance with the 

guidelines specified for ADAMS. If staff members have questions, they contact the author for 

any necessary clarification. There are variations in names or topics used in creating the titles,

which is one reason that we are working on creating an agency taxonomy to help standardize 

the form of the name.

Q5: What does “is not equal to” mean for title searches? Does it mean “does not include”?

A5: This is from the ADAMS User Guide, page 24:

Document Properties Operators 

The following operators can be used when searching document properties. The operators 

available in the drop down box will depend on the property selected. 

Is equal to—retrieves documents with a property value that matches what was entered in the 

Value column. 

Is not equal to—retrieves documents whose property values do not match what was entered in 

the Value column.

Includes—retrieves documents that contain values, in the property field, that start with what 

was entered in the Value column. For example, if this operator was selected for a Document 

Title search; it would return documents with titles that contain words that start with the value 

entered.

“Is not equal to” is not the best method for searching, since it excludes any documents that 

contain the search term; it is better to specify the search term that you want to find.

Q6: Why can’t ADAMS use more traditional and well-known tools for searching?

There are many other search tools that are used for retrieving information, such as ProQuest, 

Lexis/Nexis, Google, and others. When the agency was developing ADAMS, the staff chose the 

software platform that provided the best match for the specific system requirements at the time. 

Over the lifetime of ADAMS, the NRC has moved to a newer generation of that platform and 

continues to use it to support many agency information repositories, including ADAMS. While 

Web-based ADAMS may not do everything in the way that other platforms do, it has proved to 

be a successful system for supporting public use of and access to NRC documents.
3. New Business or Questions—Anna McGowan and OIS Technical staff (2:25–2:35 PM)

Q1: The idea of an agency taxonomy is great. Please keep the document type codes.

Also, with the new meeting system, I’ve noticed the meeting announcements are being 

duplicated in the daily ADAMS folders. 

A1: We are close to deploying a revised Public Meeting Notice System (PMNS), which will 

eliminate the duplications. When staff members change a meeting notice they have already 

released, the PMNS will change the previous notice to “non-public” and set the new version to

“public.”

Please send any comments on the PMNS to the PDR staff, who will send the comments to the 

developers. 

Ms. McGowan concluded by thanking the participants for joining the meeting and reminded 

them that the next AUG meeting will be in autumn 2014. A call for agenda items will be sent out 

through the ADAMS user group distribution list closer to the meeting date.

3. Adjournment (2:35 PM)