Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 810 7th Street, NW, Room 3625, Washington, DC 20531

R -- INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES POC Janice P. Waller, Contracting Officer (202) 307-1418 The National Institute of Justice, the Research Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, through collaboration with other Federal Partnerships Against Violence Network (PAVNET) partners, intends to create an online searchable data base tracking Federal research on violence, to be called PAVNET II, through a contract with RAND, a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC). Through PAVNET II, the Federal PAVNET partners will provide a single, World Wide Web-based, searchable source for information about all ongoing Federal research on issues related to violence -- causes, prevention, treatment, and enforcement. Many agencies of the Federal government have undertaken research efforts to ameliorate the devastating impact violence has inflicted on American society. By providing a single source of information about ongoing Federal research on violence, PAVNET II can encourage collaboration across disciplines, reduce duplicative efforts, and provide a mechanism for cross-fertilization of ideas in shaping research agendas. PAVNET II is borne of the understanding that efforts to reduce violence must involve efforts across research disciplines -- the fields of criminal justice, social sciences, education, child development, substance abuse prevention, all share a role. RAND has constructed a database entitled "Research and Development in the United States", or "RaDiUS", the only comprehensive database tracking-down to the program level -- funds invested by the U.S. Government on research and development. PAVNET II will draw upon the data collection work undertaken for RaDiUS to develop a comprehensive data base of Federal research on violence that can be accessed and searched via the Internet. RaDiUS was created by RAND to assist its Critical Technologies Institute in providing analytical support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council. Through PAVNET II, RAND will develop, in consultation with NIJ and the other PAVNET partners, an integrated taxonomy of terms concerning violence. The development of this taxonomy will involve research of the RaDiUS database to examine terminology used by various Federal agencies to describe research projects on violence, so the resulting PAVNET II data base will be able to cross-index similar terms for data retrieval purposes. This taxonomy of terms will then be used by RAND to conduct quarterly searches of RaDiUS for all Federal research related to violence. The results of these searches will be formatted and made available on the Internet via PAVNET II. Building RaDiUS involved an extensive effort to identify the various existing federal sources of information regarding research and development activities for each federal agency, and designing an organizational framework to merge these data into a common relational data system. Maintenance of the system involves the application of a labor-intensive, database-management process to import data from the 25 different federal agencies and manipulate the data to conform to the central organizational structure. Through RaDiUS, much of the logistical work that would await any effort to compile a database of ongoing Federal research has already been undertaken and completed, therefore the use of this existing database will significantly reduce the development costs of the PAVNET II project. This notice is not a request for offerors, as this will be a sole-source requirement. The SIC code is 7375. (0006)

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