Agency: a specific entity of the United States Government as defined by the United States Government Manual.

Central Processing Unit: the unit that receives collections for digitization from the Nodes. At this Unit, each document in the collection is checked for Destructive/Nondestructive scanning, metadata is applied, and then the collection is sent to the appropriate site for scanning.

Collection: a defined group of publications to be digitized. Generally a collection will contain at least 6,000 items or pages, although smaller collections may be used when appropriate. A collection can have more than one series; rarely will a series be divided into multiple collections. 

Content Contributors: will provide technical reports for digitization. A content contributor’s responsibilities include creating an inventory of the reports, taking the necessary steps to have the reports removed from their collections, and shipping the reports to the node responsible for that processing unit.

Destructive/Nondestructive Scanning: Destructive scanning is implemented when two copies of a technical report in good condition are available. One copy will be scanned without being returned to the Content Contributor. The second copy will be sent to a Preservation Partner and becomes a part of the Distributed Archive.
Nondestructive scanning is implemented when only one copy of a technical report can be located. It is scanned and sent to the Preservation Partner where it becomes a part of the Distributed Archive.

Node: an institution responsible for soliciting and collecting from Content Contributors two copies of each report, adding those reports to the processing unit inventory, and shipping them to the Central Processing Unit.

Preservation Partner: an institution that will be responsible for hosting one print copy of each digitized report as part of the Distributed Archive.

Series: a defined publication with a unique suDoc that is numbered or unnumbered. Title changes without suDoc changes do not constitute a new series.