In 1990-91, few in the public or private sectors had considered the growing economic problems stemming from loss of critical, professional skills. Long-term employees died, retired, or simply moved to new jobs, and when they did, their skills left with them.

One group at Sandia National Labs did see the growing problem. The group is the principle group in the country responsible for decelerator research (parachutes, airbags, etc.) for the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and NASA. For example, this is the group that did the proof-of-concept for using airbags on the Mars Rover Project. They are also the group that designed the parachute currently being used on the space shuttle. Finally, they are also the group that designs and maintains all parachutes used in the nuclear weapons program.

The manager of this group became alarmed when she recognized that many of her researchers were retiring, and because they worked on unique projects, their skills went with them when they went.

The effort of this project was to examine current technologies for options that would make it possible to capture and preserve some of these skills. For a year, we examined various technologies, including MPEG video and multimedia authoring systems.

At the end of our research, we constructed and tested a small multimedia module. While we were unable to create a complete and successful project, we were able to map out protocols that would be useful once technologies were available.

The protocols that we mapped out include a new genre that includes a hybrid of step-by-step instruction sets and extensive demonstrations via video.

Positives

(1) MPEG technologies were becoming available -- although at the time, a card capable of decoding MPEG cost about $1000.

(2) CD burning capabilities were becoming available.

Negatives

(1) It took very little time to recognize that any realistic collection of skills would be measured in gigabytes -- well beyond the capabilities of technologies existing at the time.

Conclusions

Although we were able to design capture and production protocols that eventually worked well, technologies of the time were inadequate for our needs and the project was postponed until technologies came available.

Publications

Results of this research were published as a part of a 1999 project.

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