VASTEC Partners with National Technical Information Service (NTIS)

Washington, DC, April 09, 2009 --(PR.com)-- VASTEC, a provider of document digitization and automation processes, has reached an agreement with the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) to digitize media resulting from federally funded research projects across the United States.

“This is a major initiative and it comes at an important time for our nation,” said VASTEC’s General Manager, Gerry Nadeau. “The NTIS has a wide range of information that can be vital to our economic recovery. Digitization and accessibility will make this information more available to all, at a time when it is most needed. VASTEC will be a proud partner in this effort for many years to come.”

For the past 60 years the NTIS has made information publicly available through approximately three million publications. “Our mission is to support the Department of Commerce to promote economic growth by providing access to information that stimulates innovation and discovery,” said Shannon Burrington, NTIS Associate Director in the Office of Federal Services. “Today, NTIS is the largest central resource for government funded scientific, engineering and business related information.”

As part of this agreement VASTEC will digitize materials collected from research projects, as well as material in the vast NTIS library. All work completed under this project will be processed to meet accessibility standards as directed under Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act. The law requires Federal agencies' electronic documents and information technology to be accessible to people with disabilities. VASTEC has established itself as a leader in this field, having digitized more than 10 million sensitive U.S. Department of Defense documents in 2008 to strict Section 508 accessibility standards.

“The work is already underway,” said VASTEC’s Chief Technology Officer David Lay. “We have started processing the initial batch of two million documents, and eventually plan to digitize the entire NTIS library.”

The work is being completed at VASTEC’s 17,000 square foot facility in Tampa, Florida. As with the U.S. Department of Defense project, the documents will be processed under strict security. To ensure accuracy the media will be processed through multiple OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs, and verified through quality content review procedures.

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