2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

Solutions - Delivering Services Customers Want
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BEST PRACTICES 2012
The NTIS collection of scientific and technical information is vast, representing
billions of dollars in federally-funded research. It’s vital to the NTIS mission that
this repository is easily accessible to our customers. As such, over the years we’ve
developed new ways of allowing customers to access this important repository. In
2009, NTIS introduced the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL), an online
platform for the research and dissemination of our repository content. Over the
past 3 years NTIS sought to improve the NTRL by engaging and interacting with our
customers. During this period, we developed an interim version of the NTRL known
as V2.0 to gather further comments and suggestions from our customers. Although
this version represented an improvement over the first iteration, our customers
spoke and we listened, and most importantly took action. In 2012 we introduced a
much-improved NTRL V3.0 using the open-source Fedora/SOLR platform. This new
and improved NTRL offers the features and functionalities most commonly
requested by our customers. We owe much of the development of the NTRL V3.0 to
our customers, as their voice was our most important consideration.