PROPOSAL TO THE INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION HANDLING COMMITTEE: REQUIREMENT TO PRODUCE ELECTRICAL PRECIS OF HARD COPY INTELLIGENCE REPORTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86M00017R001501130069-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 4, 2009
• Sequence Number: 69
• Publication Date: January 5, 1984
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 2009/09/04: CIA-RDP86M00017RO01501130069-3
CONFIDENTIAL
PROPOSAL TO THE INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION HANDLING COMMITTEE:
REQUIREMENT TO PRODUCE ELECTRICAL PRECIS OF HARD COPY INTELLIGENCE REPORTS
Formats Subcommittee
ha rman
IHC Executive Secretary
5 January 1984
CONF1DEETIAL
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 1. The Intelligence Camnunity should adopt a requirement that
all of its reports be transmitted electrically whenever possi-
ble. The only exceptions should be reports that are very long
or that must include graphic presentations.
2. For those reports that are put out in hard copy because
they are too long or include graphics, it should be required
that a summary or precis be issued electrically. The precis
would be in the standard format adopted for all intelligence
reports circulated electrically among the national level agen-
cies.
3. Certain very sensitive report series (those normally given
a name only distribution) would be exempted from these re-
quirements.
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CONFIDENTIAL
1. INTRODUCTION - One of the most serious information handling problems
facing the members of the Intelligence Community today is capturing the
massive amount of hard copy material with which we need to deal. We can
build the most sophisticated SAFEs and which do marvelous jobs
in providing relevant information to analysts in seconds, but they will
be totally incomplete without the hardcopy material. We are still
forced to hand distribute, file, and retrieve millions of pages of
printed documents each year. Even if we had the manpower to do this job
effectively, we would still be losing out by having a limited retrieval
and research capability. The only current alternative is for each reci-
pient agency to have analysts read each document and prepare abstracts
for their machine retrieval systems, trying to capture in a few minutes
all the pertinent points and keywords. This type of effort is obviously
expensive and too slow to meet the needs of intelligence analysts in
today's world.
II. PROPOSAL - The ultimate solution to this problem is to receive all
information in an electrical form. Unfortunately, we have no control
over the means by which much of the information we need is circulated.
We can encourage some commercial publishers to provide their information
electronically, but we cannot change the fact that much of what we need
will be in the printed form. There is one very major portion of the in-
formation we use that we do have control over - INTELLIGENCE REPORTS.
III. SUMMARY - if this proposal is adopted, much more of the informa-
tion we must handle can be mechanized. It will be available to analysts
faster and retrievable at a much deeper level of detail. It would sig-
nificantly reduce manual distribution loads and human indexing efforts.
CONFIDE NTIAL.r
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VVItil lYam"& 7 a ai
it would also mean that all intelligence reports would be contained in
our retrieval systems. An analyst would not have to go to several dif-
ferent places to find all the items pertinent to a specific problem.
The precis would be the indexing mechanism for hard copy reports.
They would also serve as an advance alerting device for hard copy re-
ports that are in the printing and distribution channels. If the precis
is prepared by the author of the hard copy report at the same time, the
cost would be very low and the benefits would be high.
IV. SAMPLES
CONFIDENTIAL
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