INIS strategic planning and INIS Clearinghouse document delivery: from four weeks to four minutes

I joined INIS in May 1994 as a consultant to create a Strategic Plan for 1995–2000. I had left a US Department of Justice contractor, Aspen Corporation, which operated the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), as chief of two libraries and manager of a clearinghouse for the world's criminal justice literature. NCJRS collected this literature, created a bibliographic on-line database and converted non-copyrighted literature to microfiche. The government contract had to be renewed every five years and the Aspen proposal was basically a five year strategic plan, to which I contributed. Thus, when I came to INIS, I had an understanding of the process. The next six months were devoted to preparing STRATEGIC GUIDELINES FOR INIS DEVELOPMENTS 1995–2000 with the caveat: Notice: The guidelines proposed in this report are those of the Information Consultant. They represent a wide range of options that are being presented for further refinement by Peer Reviewers, INIS Consultants and finally the Advisory Committee for INIS. Forwarding of these guidelines does not represent concurrence or nonconcurrence by the INIS Secretariat. 30 September 1994. Member States are now collecting and submitting most of their NCL in electronic format. It is sent to INIS for quality control and consolidation. Consequently, INIS staff has been gradually reduced. The amount of NCL disseminated has remained constant, and an ongoing process to digitize the entire INIS collection on microfiche will be completed in 2016, a process I started in 1999. Before leaving INIS in 1999, I realized that the future would provide a reduced requirement for INIS imaging and recommended the Clearinghouse become a resource for all of the IAEA. Today it serves that purpose