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Collection Card for Current Research Information System (CRIS) Data Files

Scope and Content

This collection is the National Archives’ holdings of the annual data files of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Current Research Information System (CRIS) — USDA’s reporting system for federally funded agricultural, food, and forestry research projects — as captured from the National Archives Catalog. It is NARA series 6207709, in Record Group 164 (Records of the Cooperative State Research Service, the USDA unit that ran CRIS).

It holds six annual data files, one per fiscal year for FY 1988–1991, 1993, and 1994. Each is a fixed-width ASCII text file distributed as a ZIP archive (roughly 45–50 MB compressed). Two PDF documents are shared across all six years: CRIS_TSS367.pdf, the technical-specifications manifest (file names, sizes, record counts, and the fixed-length 82-byte record format), and 367_1DP.pdf, the technical documentation — NARA validation statements for FY 1988 and FY 1991, NARA sample-record printouts, and the CRIS/HNRIMS “DIALOG File Design Specifications, Format B” data-element dictionary (Cooperative State Research Service, USDA, February 1990). The annual files use that DIALOG interchange format, and CRIS was a live DIALOG online file (File 60) in this period; see ../research/cris-dialog/README.md. FY 1992 is absent from the series — recorded as not found by NARA Catalog API enumeration on 2026-09-07, not as confirmed nonexistent.

For this project the files are a candidate source for tracing federally funded research projects — investigators, institutions, funding, and subject classifications — across the BARC/ARS orbit in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whether and how these particular files name Beltsville projects is an open question; the data has been preserved but not yet read. These accessioned FY 1988–1994 files are distinct from the live CRIS/REEIS system USDA still operates.

Members and Arrangement

The collection is arranged chronologically, one member per fiscal year. Each member is a single annual data file (a fixed-width ASCII text file in a ZIP archive) accompanied by the two shared documentation PDFs described in Scope and Content. The members, by fiscal year and National Archives Identifier:

Item cards for the members are not written yet — the payloads are captured but not extracted to tabular datasets — so each appears as pending in the frontmatter. FY 1992 has no member; its absence from the series is recorded and attributed in Scope and Content.

Custodial History and Processing

The records were created by USDA’s Cooperative State Research Service and accessioned by the National Archives as electronic records under Record Group 164, series 6207709, which NARA publishes for public download through the National Archives Catalog (https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6207709).

Unlike the derived datasets elsewhere in this workspace, these files are preserved verbatim. This project applied no OCR, extraction, or normalization: the acquisition is a web capture of NARA’s own electronic records exactly as served. On 2026-09-07 the seven catalog description pages, the eight digital-object files, and the catalog’s machine-readable metadata were captured with Browsertrix Crawler (pinned image 1.14.3) into a WACZ, recorded as acquisition cris-nara-data-files-20260907T194333Z in the addressable-evidence workspace. Every captured file was verified byte-identical to the bytes NARA serves. Two files (FY 1989, FY 1990) differ from NARA’s catalog metadata size by one byte; a live re-fetch confirmed the capture matches the server, so the discrepancy is NARA metadata imprecision, not a capture fault.

Because the files are preserved as-is, the collection has no member item cards yet. Deriving tabular datasets from the fixed-width text — which would produce the per-year member cards now marked pending — is separate, later work.

Conditions Governing Access and Use

The underlying records are U.S. federal government records — created by a USDA agency and held by the National Archives — and carry no copyright; the collection is treated as public domain and offered under CC0-1.0 (see ../RIGHTS.md). No member has a non-federal source, so no per-member rights exception applies.

Access is currently local to the research workspace: the data has been captured (acquisition cris-nara-data-files-20260907T194333Z) but not published. The originals remain openly available to anyone through NARA’s public catalog. The capture itself is held access-restricted pending human review, and its rights record flags a required takedown review before any publication — a procedural check on the capture, not a rights restriction on the records.

Changelog