About FABERC
The National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Building and Fire Research Laboratory (NIST/BFRL), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have formed a partnership with the purpose of creating a digital library for the building and fire science communities. This digital library, known as FABERC (pronounced "Fabric"), will consist of an online collection of resources accessible through a central portal, which will be widely available, easily accessed, and broadly indexed. FABERC will be like a conjunction of a conventional library's card catalog, a Web search engine, and a librarian, pointing to available resources that are pertinent to the fire science and related building fields. No single entity will "own" FABERC; rather, FABERC will serve as a clearinghouse or collection of collections, with many and varied partners developing, contributing, and maintaining their own collections, each of which would be accessible and searchable under the FABERC umbrella. Some information will be freely available and some organizations may charge a fee to download specified reports, statistics, journal articles, etc. FABERC will lead the user to appropriate information of which the user might not otherwise be aware. Search engines deliver a glut of links to results with little assessment or evaluation of applicability to a specific field; online portals enhance search capabilities, provide evaluation of content quality, aggregate results, and enable browsing by categories.
The National Science Foundation, through its National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program, provides funding for the development of interlinked digital libraries in technical areas as diverse as atmospheric visualization, biosciences, computing and information technology, and earthquakes. Some examples of existing NSDL libraries are the Digital Library for Earth Science (DLESE, www.dlese.org), the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Training (Merlot, www.merlot.org), and the Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMETE, www.smete.org). The digital library for building and fire sciences will add to the NSF/NSDL collection.
Both NIST/BFRL and WPI have been involved in creating on-line fire information. NIST/BFRL has been involved in electronic dissemination of fire information since the mid 1980's and currently operates three on-line sources of fire information:
These resources from NIST/BFRL provide knowledgeable users with access to fire data, research articles and reports, computer models, and other pertinent information. NIST/BFRL continues to produce materials of interest to the building and fire research communities and, as a prime directive, makes this information available to the public at large. In fact, NIST/BFRL has committed to developing an online Digital Library to expand and enhance what is currently available. NIST/BFRL has set a 2005 budget milestone to "Implement an online multimedia library, to serve as the major node for fire research and building information throughout the world, in collaboration with major stakeholders in the community". These collections will be included in the collections that are accessible through FABERC, which may raise the visibility of the information.
WPI has been involved in digital libraries for Fire Protection since 2001 and has multiple ongoing efforts: creation of department collection, collaboration with NIST/BFRL to develop an online collection of fire experiment data, and implementation of a portal for NSDL. The departmental collection has an educational focus with the goal of providing a centralized source of multimedia materials for classroom usage.
An Experiment Database for Fire Science (EDaFS, pronounced "edifice") is currently under development and now in Beta testing, providing a collection of fire experimental data with a virtual reality interface. EDaFS will serve as an online data warehouse that will augment existing collections. The content includes experiment data, video clips, and photographs, accessible through a virtual reality interface, such that users can quickly and easily select the instruments and experiments from which they want to view data. EDaFS may also help to standardize the manner in which experimental data is stored in the fire science community by defining the structure under which such data is stored; in addition, minimum required information is defined, such that users of the data need not communicate constantly with the experimentalist to determine where, for example, certain instruments were placed.
Currently, a search of the World Wide Web for information on fire will lead the user to a wide array of sites of unknown and varied quality and reliability. For example, we searched under wildland fires and up came a model that predicted fire spread developed by a television station with very little science behind it. Also, a standard search is not able to answer a wide array of fire related questions such as, What is the heat release rate of couch? What fire standards address egress concerns? Can I find a fire investigation report for a particular type of building or ignition source? How many people died in fires last year in a particular area of the country or particular occupancy?
Ongoing tasks for EDaFS are the creation of phenomenological and visual tools for experimental data and the addition of new data and experiments to expand the database. Ongoing tasks for the FABERC NSDL node include cataloging existing resources, developing, testing, and publishing the portal, assessing project outcomes, and creating awareness of project.
We hope that FABERC will extend access to existing resources, encourage collection development, and enable content owners to control access to their materials. Eventually, FABERC will contain modules and databases on such varied topics as:
We also seek to partner with your organization. You are invited to join the FABERC effort by participating in collection development, governance structure, policy selection and application, accession of existing resources. The audience for FABERC is to include among others, architects, engineers, manufacturers, authorities having jurisdiction, contractors, owners, fire investigators, and educators.