184 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



served successively as Records Ofl&cers, and Miss Hope Cowles as Techni- 

 cal Assistant. 



As OSRD w^as a temporary organization, it was apparent from the be- 

 ginning that the files ultimately would be transferred to some other agency. 

 In anticipation of that event OSRD obtained on detail a staff member from 

 National Archives to aid in assuring that OSRD files would fit in with the 

 planning of that agency. No attempt was made to prescribe the type of 

 files or filing system to be followed by the divisions and sections. With 

 the end of the war, however, the central records section made members of 

 its staff available to review division files with a view to eliminating dupli- 

 cate and unnecessary records. As each division office closed, its files were 

 sent into the central office where they were treated as integral units with 

 no attempt to incorporate them into the general files. 



Procedures. The need for co-ordinating the procedural material essential 

 to obtain the necessary minimum of uniformity in compliance with over- 

 riding Government regulations led to the establishment of the procedures 

 section. It performed a useful function in preparing and reviewing pro- 

 cedural releases to forestall the issuance of conflicting or unco-ordinated 

 instructions, eliminating obsolete materials, classifying proposed releases in 

 appropriate categories, seeing that basic materials reached the people who 

 should have them, and indicating their relation to previous releases. Un- 

 der its direction the various OSRD administrative circulars were grouped 

 and cross-referenced in numerical series which gave a fair degree of as- 

 surance that all the material issued in that form on a particular subject 

 was in a single place and easily accessible. In addition a small staff of ana- 

 lysts, under the direction of Miss Embrey assisted by Mrs. Esther Stern, 

 from time to time surveyed the operation of various units in the Adminis- 

 trative Office with a view to improving and co-ordinating work procedures 

 of such units in their relation to each other and to other units of NDRC 

 and CMR. 



Project Control. The fact that several branches of the Army and of the 

 Navy requested assistance of NDRC early made it desirable to establish 

 some convenient method of keeping track of the various requests. An 

 arrangement was worked out under which requests were numbered in 

 the order of their submission, with a separate series for each requesting 

 technical service. Thus the first Signal Corps request received the desig- 

 nation SCi, and the first Army Air Corps request ACi. Navy requests 

 were identified by the key letter N, followed by another letter indicating 

 the originating Bureau and the proper number, NO for the Bureau of 

 Ordnance, NA for Bureau of Aeronautics, etc. Project requests were re- 

 quired to be submitted formally through the officially designated Service 

 liaison to NDRC, i.e., through the Co-ordinator of Research and Develop- 

 ment of the Navy or through the War Department Liaison Officer for the 



