NSRC Digital Collections: Preserving decades of data for the researchers of today

When a building automation system failed last Thanksgiving, causing HVAC transfer coils to freeze and burst, the Lab’s Nuclear and Radiochemistry group narrowly avoided losing historic materials vital to their work—a potentially catastrophic reminder of the importance of the National Security Research Center’s ongoing work to digitize these and other valuable holdings across the Lab.

The NSRC Digital Collections Group

The Digital Collections group within the NSRC—the Lab’s classified library—has the herculean task of  converting an ever-growing trove of past and present scientific materials into digital format. Armed with training, expertise, and state-of-the-art equipment, they are more than up to the challenge.

“Our group is made up of two teams of highly skilled professionals trained in best practices,” said Group Leader Nanette Mayfield. The teams digitize various types of classified media—ranging from technical reports to film reels to microfiche—to provide high-quality products to the NSRC’s customers.

Digitizing an image or document not only preserves the item in its present state and safeguards it from damage but also enables researchers to access it more readily. After going through rigorous quality control procedures, newly digitized materials are uploaded to the Online Vault, a classified repository accessible to weapons researchers throughout the Lab.

The National Technical Nuclear Forensics team uses the NSRC daily, says former team member Julianna Fessenden, now division leader of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “In forensics, this team inverse calculates device properties after an explosion. They require documents from the archives to benchmark their forward models. This team exists to ensure our national security, and the NSRC is an invaluable partner to help them do this.”

What materials are being digitized and why are they important?

The work of the NSRC’s Digital Collections group is critical to the Lab’s national security mission. Much of the material held by the NSRC does not exist elsewhere in the nuclear enterprise, and the information is necessary for today’s weapons-related work. The media include the following:

• Original motion picture film reels from historic nuclear tests
• Tapes, videocassettes, and CDs of lectures, trainings, and procedures
• Negatives, photographs, and radiographs; microfiche and microfilm
• Technical notebooks and reports

These materials—which number in the millions—document the work of the past and provide key knowledge informing the Lab’s present and future mission and capabilities.

Among the NSRC’s holdings is a large collection from the Rocky Flats Plant, a U.S. weapons manufacturing complex no longer in operation. The Rocky Flats Collection contains data critical to modern-day pit production and actinide science; without these data, much prior work would have to be repeated.

“The Rocky Flats records help Weapons Production avoid millions in costs and save months on the production schedule,” said Robert Putnam, senior director of the Technical Applications Office. 

“The NSRC’s innovative processes to provide historical information digitally enable Weapons Production to meet key delivery milestones and improve pit acceptance rates and production capacity.”

The Rocky Flats Collection contains the analytical chemistry information on hundreds of items ​still held at Los Alamos, according to scientists Victoria Longmire, who is retired from the Lab and now works as a contractor, and David Prochnow. “This is the most accurate assay data, and redoing such assays could cost over $100,000 per item,” added Prochnow.

Cross-team collaboration saves valuable data

In addition to digitizing materials already held by the NSRC, the Digital Collections group works with others across the Lab to digitize their respective holdings.

“The digitization program is critical to the Nuclear and Radiochemical group’s current and future operations,” said Assessment team leader Hugh Selby, after the Thanksgiving near miss.

“Our holdings include one-of-a-kind historic materials that underpin key diagnostics for the entire weapons testing program,” Selby explained. “These materials are not only invaluable from a historical perspective, they are also our main reference working documents today. While some digitization has been done in the past, it has been largely home-grown and is far from complete, nor is it up to the standard of the NSRC work. Loss of this material to flooding would represent an incalculable loss to many major programs.”

When the W76 Systems Engineering group needed to achieve a long-standing objective of more effectively managing thousands of documents from the United Kingdom, Digital Collections worked closely with that team over several years to digitize the materials and ensure their searchability by adding metadata to PDF coversheets.

“The original digitized image files weren’t reliably, electronically searchable,” said System Engineer Joshua Minyard. “Years of efforts by the Digital Collections teams have resulted in our group being able to decrease search times for any given document from a matter of weeks to hours, and will soon pave the way to enable full inventories of these documents for the first time.”

The NSRC’s Digital Collections group is continually adding new and legacy content to the classified Online Vault repository, ensuring that researchers have secure and reliable digital access to the Lab’s ever-growing collection of mission-critical materials.

The National Security Research Center Digital Collections Teams at Work

A new five-minute video gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the NSRC Digital Collections teams at work.