PART IV.  INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND PUBLIC ACCESS

     Information is the lifeblood of the Committee's work, and
this imposes two fundamental tasks.  First, data must be
organized to be useful to the Committee and the public during the
Committee's term.  Second, data must be organized to be available
to the public and the Interagency Working Group following the
completion of the Committee's work.  As of mid-October, progress
includes the following:

     o    Well over 370 individual document accessions, ranging
          in size from 1 or 2 documents to several thousand, had
          been received or retrieved from a wide variety of
          public and private sources.

     o    Data (often fragmentary, as noted) had been received on
          many hundreds of experiments.

     o    Almost 2,000 journal articles, Congressional reports,
          and secondary sources that bear on experiments or
          experimentation have been assembled.

     As discussed above, the Committee is simultaneously engaged
in many projects dependent upon the compilation and organization
of additional data.  Of necessity, the creation of a system to
permit efficient use of data has been a central focus of staff
effort. The details of the information systems available to the
Committee and the public are provided in Appendix F; highlights
include the following:

     o    The Committee has an interactive network based on Lotus
          Notes, for use by staff. The Committee expects to
          shortly connect with the public via the Internet.  The
          network should provide direct public access to the
          index of document collections possessed by the
          Committee, and to the experiment database.

     o    The Committee has established a public reading room.
          Basic committee materials (e.g., transcripts and
          briefing books for each meeting) are available.  As
          they are assembled by staff, collections of
          historically important material (e.g., minutes of
          important committees, histories of relevant programs)
          are being organized and made available in the reading
          room.




Interim Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments, October 21, 1994