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While the Secretary of Commerce, William M. Daley, announced plans to shut down the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) last month, the website offering much of its information to both the public and private sector called http://www.usgovsearch.com (Enterprise Edition site) continues to grow in importance to researchers within the federal government and information librarians around the globe. Northern Light Technology, LLC (http://www.NorthernLight.com and http://www.NLResearch.com), the joint venture partner of the website with NTIS, launched the site in May of this year, beginning its planning in March. A bit of controversy swirled around fee versus free sections in its initial launch. In its initial launch, the site did offer completely free searching, but now a fee-based subscription and per-article charge has been implemented for all but public libraries (http://usgovsearch.northernlight.com/publicaccess--Public Library Access Program), and some teaching institutions. While NTIS documents have been available on the web via NTIS websites, finding the right documents when researching has been the proverbial "needle in a haystack."

The bulk of the premium, pay-per-view content in usgovsearch.com comes from abstracts from the NTIS database that has been called the oldest and largest database in the history of online, by Searcher magazine. The database encompasses abstracts for U.S. government-sponsored research, development, and engineering (both in-house and contracted), plus abstracts describing analyses from federal agencies, their contractors, or grantees, in addition to foreign research from the Japan Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), laboratories administered by the United Kingdom Department of Industry, the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (BMFT); the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), plus others. For the traditional information librarian in the government space, more than 20,000 federal government home pages exist. Over 4 million web pages in the US government domain currently exist and are searchable through usgovsearch.com. The joint venture website combines the search engine technology of Northern Light with tremendous content, transforming known data into organized collections, 2 million records, that can be searched with more than 25,000 terms at present.

Last month, Northern Light released a statement saying, "We have a close partnership with NTIS. They provide many of the components of our service, especially on the premium information side. Whatever happens, we hope to maintain access to the database of government data that we expect to live on in some form, though possibly from a different source."

Renee Edwards, public affairs director for NTIS, said, "NTIS status has no bearing on the contractual agreement between Northern Light and NTIS at this time." There has been no decision as to when or how the duties of NTIS will be turned over or migrated to other government agencies, and a date has not been set for it's dismantling.

NTIS's role has been as a publisher of government documents with scientific, technical, engineering, and related business information. However, most users of NTIS's database and services, recognize its primary functions as identifying, describing, and delivering federal contract research reports. The existing NTIS site (http://www.ntis.gov) is a commercial site designed to sell information products, and it uses a WAIS search engine. Earlier attempts to provide comprehensive access to government information, such as GovBot (http://ciir2.cs.umass.edu/Govbot), U.S. Business Advisor (http://www.business.gov) and GILS (Government Information Locator Service) were not widely accepted.

Fedworld had evolved from a bulletin board service to an information kiosk function (http://www.fedworld.gov), but its search capability is limited by its WAIS engine, and users have said it can be confusing and difficult to use.

Discussion has focused around the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) as the successor to NTIS. Northern Light has focused on building its system to represent all title and abstract data from NTIS since 1964 plus 5,600 journals, reference sources, books, magazines, and newswires not available from any other search engine. The collection can be browsed starting at: http://govsearch.northernlight.com/docs/specoll_help_catlook.html

Online customer support is available through the accounts button on the left of the usgovsearch home page. This enables you to review your purchases, update your account, get refunds of document purchases, and close accounts. Billing is done on an accumulation basis at least once each month.

The true strength of usgovsearch.com lies in the combined features with other Northern Light databases called special collections, and site searches related to government and the military throughout the World Wide Web. The Power Search feature form contains the 50 broad NTIS subject categories. Usgovsearch.com indexes more than 20,000 US Government Agency and military sites, 4 million federal web pages, 2 million abstracts from NTIS, and 12 million full-text articles from Northern Light Special Collections from government-oriented periodicals, like Jane's Defense Weekly. It can also be accessed from nlsearch.com. At present, usgovsearch appeals to corporate users, consultants, and to some extent the general library community that require government information.

NTIS provided Northern Light with an initial list of 4,000 to 5,000 government websites. These were then crawled a number of times by the Northern Light search crawler to establish frequency of updates to the sites. Not all government sites have .gov or .mil in the URL. Some sites with .org and .com may be government-sponsored or hosted, so a procedure has been established to validate sites. NTIS estimates that there are between 25 to 50 new government sites coming online each week.

Noise continues about the nature of free versus fee-based government information. The current model at usgovsearch.com is a $5/day pass minimum plus nominal charges under $5 for various restricted content. A money-back guarantee applies for articles purchased. An annual pass costs $250. Northern Light will be introducing a web-only version targeted for use by the public and Federal Depository Libraries in the next six months. Northern Light will also continue to offer a subscription-based version that includes extended searching across the Northern Light premium content, and the NTIS bibliographic database of abstracts. " The usgovsearch product will continue to be the most comprehensive single site to locate hard to find government information. It will continue to be enhanced as new technology and engineering schedules permit. We have invited and encouraged public libraries to point to the Web-only version to provide the best tool to their patrons for researching information about and by the government," said Sandy Waters, vice president of government and international markets, for Northern Light Technology, LLC. Other sites with government hooks worthy of mention, but not tied to Northern Light, include: the Federal Government Resources on the Web (http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/Documents.center/federal.html from the University of Michigan Library, and Fedstats (http://www.fedstats.gov) which offers one-stop shopping to statistical information gathered by federal government agencies. The NTIS database has been able to be accessed through a number of fee-based vendors, including Dialog for many years. Some of the commercial funds were returned into the NTIS system for indexing and database management.

"We continue to invest in usgovsearch," said David Seuss, Chief Executive Officer of Northern Light. "The site is being used often by both professional and lay researchers who need to search through the voluminous resources of the Federal Government. We will vigorously market and support usgovsearch. Northern Light benefited from the expertise of NTIS in the arena of government information during the development phase of usgovsearch, but whatever the future holds for NTIS, usgovsearch will continue unabated."

Northern Light was selected as Editor's Choice for PC Magazine in September 1999. Earlier accolades this year came in July from being selected the most comprehensive web search engine database by Nature magazine, and one of the Top 100 web sites by PC Magazine.