Introductory Email

Greetings,

My name is John Swarr, and I am a contractor working with the NIST Law Enforcement Standards Office.  NIST is currently conducting a survey with the purpose of cataloging any of NIST’s Standard Reference Databases (SRDs) or NIST Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) that are being accessed by the forensic community. We would also like to catalog any forensic databases or collections maintained outside of NIST that are being used. It is our hope that the results of this survey will serve to create a centralized repository of information on forensic databases. This will allow NIST to evaluate its SRD and SRM programs and improve upon its offerings to the forensic community. he repository will also facilitate agencies’ access to the information necessary to carry out forensic analysis in investigations and eliminate duplication of effort in database creation and reference collection maintenance.

We are contacting you in hopes of collecting any information you could share related to any internally-maintained or externally-accessed forensic databases and reference material collections you utilize in your work. This may include even small reference material collections created for just one or a few cases.  Any information that you provide will be treated as law enforcement sensitive, and will only be available to the law enforcement community. Attached is the questionnaire to familiarize you with what information is helpful to our cause.

We ask you to please take a moment to read over this file.  If you can share any information with us, you can do so in one of two ways:

1. Reply to this email with your work number and a good time(s) for us to reach you.  We will then reach out to you via phone.

2. Fill out as many of the response fields as you can in the questionnaire, and email it back to us.

If you personally cannot assist us, but you know of anyone who can, please send us their name, contact information, and agency/laboratory affiliation, and we will follow up with them.

We thank you in advance for taking the time to assist us with this collection, and we look forward to hearing from you.  If we do not hear from you, we will follow up with a phone call in the coming days.

Sincerely,

For NIST Law Enforcement Standards Office:

John Swarr

[email protected]