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NATIONAL PARK SERVICE MORNING REPORT
To: All National Park Service Areas and Offices From: Division of Ranger Activities, Washington Office Day/Date: Friday, February 8, 2002 There are no new incident or other reports this morning, so today's edition will instead concern a new communications medium for employees of the National Park Service. The National Park Service will launch the first phase of a new Intranet web site called "InsideNPS" on Monday. The site, which will be located at http://inside.nps.gov, will serve as both an information gateway and a information base for NPS employees. It will bring together daily news of general interest to employees, programmatic and regional information, internal park information, news about people, and a new NPS digital library. Over the course of the coming year, InsideNPS will expand and offer more services, following review and consultation with managers and staff from throughout the Service. There will be five main areas:• Front Page — Daily news from around the agency, including quick links to key Servicewide sites and current NPS Intranet sites.• Parks — Links to all the parks, including their normally hard-to-find Intranet addresses. There will also be links to various servicewide information systems where readers can obtain internal park information.• Programs — Web pages for each of the Service's many program areas, carrying essential information to help employees better do their jobs.• Regions — Same as above.• People — News about people from throughout the agency — promotions, awards, and more personal news, such as births and marriages.Listed by topic area, the new site will include: • The Morning Report• Legislative and Congressional updates, including bills and hearings• NPS press releases• All-employee bulletins• Events and training calendars• A monthly managers report from the Director's Office• News of comings, goings and major events in the lives of NPS people• Web sites covering every park, region and program• "Quick links" to a wide variety of information sources useful to NPS employees• An inventory of NPS information services• A digital library and research station which will serve as a gateway for searching across databases, websites, library catalogs, documents and images with content relevant to the NPS Additional components are in the planning stages and will be added over coming months:• Digests of news articles about the NPS• NPS image libraries• A Servicewide data web site that will allow viewing and downloading information contained in databases such as PMIS without having to go through the system interface• A partnerships website that will provide brief information on partnerships and will be searchable by park, program or subject• A planning documents web site that will track the status of draft documents and permit searches for existing plans by several criteria• Expanded park and regional web sites that will allow Servicewide searches for park and regional information• A listing of available NPS jobs, searchable by park, job and other criteria Director Mainella had this to say about Inside NPS in a recent memorandum to the directorate:"InsideNPS has been designed by the Information and Telecommunications Center (ITC) in consultation with many NPS information managers and staff throughout the agency. InsideNPS will help all of us in the Service do our jobs better, and will help me stay abreast of your many accomplishments, which, until now, we have not had the means to make more widely known. "InsideNPS is a work-in-progress. The introductory version is intended as a first step in demonstrating new Intranet capabilities for the efficient management, sharing and delivery of internal information. ITC will actively seek suggestions for changes and enhancements through the use of a special Web form on InsideNPS, as well as through meetings with representatives from all of your organizations. The feedback resulting from these processes will be incorporated into the development of new features that will be added during the coming year. Also planned for this year is the inclusion of more information on NPS partnerships, as well as more regional and park information. "The Washington Directorate has recently designated InsideNPS points of contact for their organizations. The Regional Office leads for ParkNet (the NPS public website) have been acting as the preliminary points of contacts for InsideNPS for the regional offices. Regional Directors should confirm those individuals as the InsideNPS contacts or, alternatively, designate new individuals for that role. Please communicate those names to Tim Cash (202-208-4495) or Ken Handwerger (202-565-1206) of the ITC Web Team as soon as possible. "One of my major goals as Director of the National Park Service is to improve communications among all employees. InsideNPS will help make this happen. This initial version of InsideNPS includes 'daily news' and features incorporating the Morning Report, web pages for all Servicewide programs (information should be provided for these by March 22, 2002), as well as many other features. I am counting on your support for this exciting initiative." * * * * * Prepared by the Division of Ranger Activities, WASO, with the cooperation and support of Delaware Water Gap NRA. --- ### --- |