12 ANNTJAL REPORT SMTTHSONTAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



the retention and eventual transfer to the Smithsonian Institution of 

 military and naval objects appropriate for the collections of the 

 National Armed Forces Museum. In addition, the staff undertook its 

 own thorough search for such objects at military and naval installa- 

 tions throughout the continental United States. The staff, in coopera- 

 tion with the Smithsonian Library, also initiated steps to acquire from 

 Armed Forces historical agencies and elsewhere significant publica- 

 tions in the fields of military and naval history, to serve as a nucleus 

 of the study center library of the proposed museum. All govern- 

 mental agencies are cooperating fully with the work of the Board. 

 Once a site for the museum has been fixed, there will be no dearth of 

 materiel around which to establish a museum exhibit plan. 



SCIENCE INFORMATION EXCHANGE 



The Science Information Exchange (S.I.E.) receives, organizes, 

 and disseminates information about scientific research in progress. 

 Its mission is to assist the planning and management of research activi- 

 ties supported by Government and non-Government agencies and insti- 

 tutions by promoting the exchange of information that concerns sub- 

 ject matter, distribution, level of effort, and other data pertaining to 

 current research in the prepublication stage. It helps program direc- 

 tors and administrators to avoid unwarranted duplication and to deter- 

 mine the most advantageous distribution of research funds. It serves 

 the entire scientific community by informing individual investigators 

 about who is currently working on problems in their special fields. 



The Exchange is concerned only with research actually in progress 

 in order to cover the 1- to 3-year information gap between the time a 

 research project is proposed or started and the time the results become 

 generally available in published form. Thus, the Exchange comple- 

 ments, rather than duplicates, the services of technical libraries and 

 established documentation centers. 



Information is received by the Exchange from all available sources, 

 specifying who supports a research task, who does it, where it is being 

 done, and a 200- word technical summary of what is being done. These 

 basic data are cast into a one-page record, the Notice of Research 

 Project (N.R.P.) that serves as the major input and output of the 

 Exchange. These records are analyzed, indexed, processed, and stored 

 in computer and manual files in such a way that a wide variety of 

 questions about any of these items or any combination of items can be 

 quickly retrieved or compiled. 



The acquisition of task records and the input workloads have con- 

 tinued to climb rapidly, from about 56,000 in fiscal year 1962 to 

 75,000 in 1063 and over ioO,000 in 1964. The output services rendered 

 to United States Government agencies and for the entire scientific 



