April 06, 2015 

 

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, 

NOVEMBER 4, 2015 

This memo accompanies the summary of the public meeting held on Wednesday, November 4, 

2015, in the Public Document Room of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This was the 

30th meeting of the ADAMS User Group. 
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Public Meeting Summary 

 

November 4, 2015 

Title: Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) User Group 

Meeting 

Meeting Identifier: ML15281A037 

Date of Meeting: Wednesday, November 4, 2015 

Location: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Public Document Room, Rockville, MD 

Type of Meeting: Category 3 

Purpose of the Meeting(s): 

To provide updates on the ADAMS system and answer questions from public ADAMS 

users. 

General Details: 

The meeting began somewhat late, at 2:25 p.m., due to technical difficulties with the 

conference phone line. Participants introduced themselves, and Anna McGowan made 

some general announcements. Eight NRC staff members were present. Ms. McGowan 

introduced Kathleen Dunsavage, a new User Services Branch member. 

Approximately two members of the public participated in the meeting remotely using a 

teleconference line, and one attended in person. Two participants asked questions and 

provided comments. Meeting participants included representatives of Oak Ridge 

National Lab and Energy Northwest. 

The remaining portion of the meeting was dedicated to issues and questions raised by 

members of the ADAMS User Group. The meeting ended at approximately 2:50 p.m. 

Public Participation Themes: 

During the public question and answer portion of the meeting, NRC staff received 

questions on the topics below. The answers were provided either during the meeting or 

after the questions were researched. 

• Digitization of older NRC documents 

 
o Question: Will the NRC’s public documents, currently available on 

microfiche, be digitized? Members of the public working on next 

generation nuclear plants should be able to have access to these older 

documents. NRC-funded work done by national labs should be made 

available. There are hundreds of NUREGs and other documents 

referenced in the Standard Review Plan which have not been digitized. 

o Answer: We will suggest this to our management. The Office of the 

Chief Information Officer is working to digitize older agency documents. 

The first group that will be digitized are permanent records, as identified 

by the program office staff; they will continue to reside in ADAMS as they 

are digitized, reviewed, and released. As the official agency records are 

digitized, any other items that are located recalled from the archives will 

also be digitized. The staff of the Public Document Room is willing to 

work with the public to check to see if other agency documents can be 

reviewed for public release, as they do currently in response to user 

requests. In a later e-mail message, a public user provided some more 

information about specific older documents to be digitization candidates. 

We would suggest that the user contact the current project officers for 

those specific cases and explain the value of those older documents for 

current discussions and decisions. Since the project officer is the one 

who prioritizes which permanent records should be digitized, informing 

him or her of the value of these documents for stakeholders will advance 

their order on the digitization schedule. 

• Cross-linked documents in ADAMS 

o Question: Can there be cross-links in ADAMS to NRC-funded documents 

that are electronically available in OSTI (the Department of Energy’s 

Office of Scientific and Technical Information) or the national labs’ Web 

sites? 

o Answer: We will suggest that to management, but I’m not sure this can 

be done in ADAMS. The OSTI database, like ADAMS, contains 

references to many agency publications. The more recent publications 

are available in full-text, and the older documents are identified by their 

bibliographic citation. ADAMS was never designed to connect to other 

databases like OSTI, and I do not believe that the agency will have the 

budget to consider this. We do work with the National Technical 

Information Service (NTIS) in their digitization project and, if there is an 

NRC report which is publicly available through NTIS, we request that the 

full document be digitized and placed in the National Technical Report 

Library (NTRL) so that it is readily available to the public. 
• ADAMS Data Reports 

o Question: Can the ADAMS data reports for the documents in the search 

results be changed? Some are redundant. 

o Answer: We can check with the ADAMS developers to see if the reports 

can be changed or expanded to provide other report options. There is 

also an option to export the reports to Excel, and they can be customized 

that way. The system developers have responded that they are willing to 

consider offering other report formats. If you have any suggestions for 

reports that you would like to generate for your search results, please 

send them to the PDR.Resource@NRC.gov mailbox, and we will send 

them to the developers for consideration. We have also learned that the 

Public Licensing Support Network will be further developed over the next 

year to include an advanced search capability that will be based on 

content analytics. It should be available in the second half of 2016. 

Action Items/Next Steps: 

Ms. McGowan asked if the participants felt that there still needed to be two User Group 

meetings a year. The response was that the current meeting schedule was fine, so the next 

ADAMS User Group meeting will be held in Spring 2016. 

The meeting ended at 2:50 p.m., when Ms. McGowan thanked the participants for their 

patience, participation, and endurance.

Enclosure: 

 1. Meeting Announcement - ML15281A037