National Library of Medicine, Office of Acquisitions Management, Building 38A, Room B1N17, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894

73 -- PERFORM DATA CREATION DUE 072696 POC Liem T. Nguyen/Contract Specialist, (301) 496-6546. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is exploring means of attaining more rapid creation of bibliographic data for the MEDLINE database. To that end, NLM intends to negotiate on a sole-source basis pursuant to FAR 6.302-1 and 41 U.S.C. 253(c)(1) with the Imaging Systems Laboratory of the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (ISL-CMU) for a fixed-price type of purchase order for the creation of 4,000 bibliographic records using the ISL-CMU Feature Center Document Conversion and Work Flow software. This unique software was developed under contract with the Federal Image Documents Understanding Laboratory for instrumenting end-to-end journal article conversion where conventional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems breakdown and to report opportunities for automating manual key-entry operations. The Feature Center software supports OCR commercial engines, the insertion of character, word, and phrase transformation engines, insertion of specialized character and symbol recognition components, insertion of very large specialized lexicons, insertion of page segmentation and page component software, sensitivity to a variety of journal fonts, multiple language character recognition, including European and Asian languages, and integration with NLM's MEDLARS input system. NLM requires that the instrumented work flow results for the journal entries processed be provided to be published in the open literature. No source other than ISL-CMU has the technologies to address the multiple facets of automated creation of MEDLINE bibliographic records in MEDLARS format in a single, end-to-end, closely controlled instrumented environment. NLM has determined that ISL-CMU is the only vendor capable of providing the necessary services. This notice of intent is not a Request for Quotations (RFQ), nor is an RFQ available. Award to ISL-CMU without full and open competition is planned. See Numbered Note(s): 22. (0193)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0484 19960712\73-0001.SOL)