NPS Focus was released in Summer 2005 as the only Office of the Chief Information Officer sponsored image management system for the whole National Park Service.

If you would like to use NPS Focus to manage the digital resources at your park or program:

1. Familiarize yourself with the staff and/or public Web sites
   NPS Focus on Inside NPS - http://focus.inside.nps.gov
   NPS Focus on NPS.gov - http://NPSfocus.nps.gov
   

2. Go to the NPS Focus Data Entry and follow the instructions for registering yourself as a new user

3. If you have any questions about ANYTHING, contact NPS Focus staff

Why use NPS Focus for your park or program image management?

• Retain local control: a user authentication and record ownership system has been put into place so that participating parks or programs will "own" the records they enter into the system. This means they control them and other parks/programs cannot add, delete, or edit their records.

• State-of-the-art metadata and image management capabilities including advanced searching, browsing and online image manipulation.

• Images and metadata are permanently preserved on a separate professional digital archiving system with a second copy stored in a second location

• One-stop-searching across images from many NPS parks and programs

• The ability to browse digital resources by subject or park

• One-on-one user support for setting up your imaging project and for cataloging yor images

• Centrally supported infrastructure - the NPS Focus system is an initiative of the NPS Office of the Chief Information Officer and is committed to providing centralized staff, hardware, and software support

• Open Standards: NPS Focus uses open standards for its software and digital contetn to ensure that all data will remain secure and re-usable even if the software vendors were to go out of business.

• Interoperability with other DOI/federal image libraries - because NPS Focus supports all national metadata standards and all national standards for integration of metadata systems, we are in an excellent position to share images with other agencies who also use federal standards.

• Compliance with OMB, DOI, and other federal guidelines for metadata and system integration and IT architecture.

• Extensive security and auditing functions