Development of electronic information search and documentation system to preserve knowledge about fast reactors

The necessity to preserve the knowledge gained in the process of fast reactors development and operation is quite obvious. For this purpose it is necessary to set up electronic libraries and suitable search systems. All the documents that contain certain information about the objects from the given field of knowledge can be referred to as sources of knowledge, i.e. they are articles, preprints, papers, clarification notes, reports, catalogs and other sources. These sources of knowledge can be found in various places, institutions, archives, etc. Usually they are kept in libraries. These sources can have different forms, e.g. electronic, printed, photo, microfiche, etc. The information about these sources of knowledge is placed in catalogs that make the process of searching for required documents much easier. Catalogs usually have a subject heading identifier, index of authors, index of topics, key words and summaries. In a certain sense, catalogs can be also considered as sources of knowledge. There are a lot of various sources of knowledge and experience in the nuclear industry under the subject of 'Fast Reactors'. All of them are in different states in terms of convenience of their use and even possibility to use this knowledge and experience once again. In the best case these sources are in the form of electronic documents that contain not only the information about certain knowledge and experience but this very knowledge and experience in the digitized electronic form. These types of catalogs are the most suitable and simple for their use. There are libraries where knowledge and experience are only kept as nondigitized images of documents. It is not so convenient to work with this information but still it is quite real to get it. If a catalogs only contains information about knowledge and experience but neither is available in electronic form, then in order to get the access to this information it will be necessary either to digitize it or to get its non-electronic copy (usually, hard copy). But even if the entire scope of information about knowledge and experience is presented in electronic catalogs, nevertheless there will be a certain problem to work with it, as to work with a lot of intangible sources may turn out to be much more time- and labor-consuming than to work with it within a single system. Two problems have to be solved in terms of knowledge preservation. The first one is related to transformation of all the sources into electronic form. The second one is related to effective search for the required information by means of the catalogs available. The first problem can be solved rather easily. All the published sources of knowledge can be scanned and transformed into electronic form. Thus, instead of printed catalogs that contain the information about sources of knowledge there will be electronic catalogs. Though this activity seems rather simple, it is still very labor-and time-consuming, because the number of these sources is tremendous. We cannot say that the first problem can be promptly solved because it will require not only great financial expenses but also significant organizational efforts. To solve the second problem is much more complicated, as currently there are no effective search systems oriented towards a specific field of knowledge that could run in heterogeneous and worldwide search environment. At the same time this problem can be solved much faster than the first one, because in this case we mean the development of a software product independent of any organizational measures. The conditions required to cope with this problem imply the availability of electronic catalogs that contain the information about sources of knowledge and their accessibility in the computer network