DJO-BJS-17-F-0077.pdf

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Data Archiving Services for the Office of Justice Programs

20531

DJO-BJS-17-F-0077

04-03-2017

N

N

541512

US Department of Justice Acquisition Management Division DOJ, Office of Justice Programs 810 7th Street, N.W.

Washington DC 20531

Debashis Nag, Contract Specialist USDOJ Office of Justice Programs 810 7th Street, NW Room 3610 Washington, DC 20531 (202)616-1705 Direct | (202)354-4154 Fax debashis.nag@usdoj.gov

US Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics 810 7th Street, NW Washington, DC

20531

USA

https://ojp.gov

US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs debashis.nag@usdoj.gov

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS (OJP)

DATA ARCHIVING SERVICES

This Request for Information (RFI) is being released pursuant to the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) Part 10 Market Research. The information collected through the process is considered to be market research as described by FAR 2.101 and in accordance with FAR 10.002. This is NOT a Request for Proposal (RFP), and nothing shall be construed herein or through the Sources Sought process to commit or obligate the Government to further action. In addition, vendors responding to this RFI shall bear all risks and expenses of any resources used to provide the requested information. The submission of capability information in response to this market survey is purely voluntary. The information provided in this RFI is subject to change.

The Department of Justice (DOJ), the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) is issuing this RFI to identify qualified and responsible business vendors (including small business vendors with the following designations: 8(a);

Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business; Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) Small Business; Small Disadvantaged Business; Veteran-Owned Small Business, Women-Owned Small Business and Economically Disadvantaged Women-Owned Small Business) having an interest in and possessing the resources and expertise to provide support to OJP in managing, archiving and disseminating a large repository of data and related documentation.

The applicable North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code assigned to these proposed services is 541512. The anticipated contract type is Time & Material. The anticipated period of performance is a base year plus four (4) option years commencing July 1, 2017. The anticipated place of performance may include on-site work at OJP at 810 7th Street NW, Washington DC 20001; work at the Contractor’s site and field locations; and work conducted via remote connection to cloud-based platforms.

Background

OJP archives federally funded data, research, and related documentation to make them available to the public and researchers conducting secondary analysis. Archiving is an important vehicle for maximizing the transparency and accountability of science and scientists.

Since 1978, OJP hosts and operates a data archive of its criminal and juvenile justice datasets at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). A diverse set of studies, including longitudinal datasets, cross sectional surveys, and program evaluations are curated and archived for secondary analysis. Each funding component requires the Principal Investigators (PI) to provide their data for archiving, unless explicitly excused from the archiving requirement, in a reasonably timely fashion, and with appropriate safeguards to protect research subjects.

NACJD employees at least 15 staff and experts involved in various archiving activities including curation, preservation and dissemination. Archiving experts employed by NACJD include curators, statisticians, IT specialists (programmers, database specialists, system administrators, etc.), metadata specialists, criminologists and social scientists. NACJD staff are dedicated to OJP archiving tasks and have developed expertise in subject areas. Due to the complexity and sensitivity of the work, the majority of NACJD staff are full time, highly skilled (at least Master’s degree) and specially trained in data curation and related activities.

NACJD expends at least 2,000 hours per month on OJP archival work. Datasets are submitted to NACJD and NACJD is obliged to coordinate their release with OJP. There are about 1G files in archival storage with 3 TB of data. Of these, about 200K files with 1TB of data are currently in dissemination and distributed as follows: a) Public use – 35K files (0.4TB) b) Restricted Use – 25K (0.6TB) c) Physical Enclave – 1K files (10GB) d) Online Analysis tool – 130K files (130GB).

NACJD uses a variety of tools for various tasks including deposit management, metadata editors, reporting generation, release management, quality assurance, notification management and package generation.

Archived data have multiple uses, including: 1) research to inform and evaluate public policy and practice on criminal justice at all levels of government; 2) test new hypotheses and approaches to prevent and reduce crime, and to improve criminal justice system; and 3) research to inform approaches and policies to prevent and respond to juvenile delinquency and victimization. Users of the archive data include law enforcement officers, researchers, and academia. There is no incumbent for this work.

Scope

The role of the Contractor is to design and develop a data archival system of National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). To achieve the intended results, the Contractor must be able to demonstrate the ability to perform the tasks below while enhancing and refining operations to more effectively meet the needs of BJS and its stakeholders. The Contractor is encouraged to be creative and innovative in their recommendations to implement the overall project.

Services

The Contractor will be required to perform the following National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) Services by supporting the development of archival data, and provide technical assistance to and consultation with potential and ongoing users of the data and supporting materials.

OJP’s supported current data archiving services at NACJD fall under four major task areas:

TASK AREA 1: Data Curation (processing)

To ensure data user needs are met, a number of steps are conducted to organize, describe, enhance, and preserve data. This adds value, improves access and ensures long-term viability of the data collections. The major steps of data curation include data ingestion, management (creation of metadata, i.e., information about the study, individual datasets, and variables), storage, and dissemination. NACJD technicians assemble data documentation files that explain the data collections, and prepare metadata and study descriptions, which provide summary information about the collections. The amount of processing required to prepare a dataset for archiving varies from project to project depending on the structure of the incoming data and the archive products being developed.

Specific tasks include:

Identification, acquisition, and processing of major crime and justice data collections supported by Federal funds, other data collections which form the basis of important studies of crime or the criminal justice system, collections of data in the area of drugs and crime, and international criminology studies

Processing the data collections to produce coherent, well-documented, user-friendly electronic data files, making these data available for secondary analysis through a website

Incorporating references to specific agency data into bibliographies of data-related literature

TASK AREA 2: Management and Dissemination of Data

Current objectives of the NACJD data management and dissemination processes include:

Preservation of funded datasets for historical purposes

Establishment and implementation of a Disclosure Review Board, as appropriate

Establishment and implementation of Restricted Data Use Agreements (RDUA), as appropriate

Developing an online data analysis and dissemination tool for a selection of datasets implementing a selection of statistical procedures

Dissemination of Federally funded datasets

Providing/ensuring restricted access to confidential data

Providing access to sensitive or “restricted access” files via a variety of methods that expands access for researchers while ensuring data security

Ensuring data security and confidentiality protection for all hosted datasets.

Continuous development of data products, as well as continuous improvement of internet based data search, exploration and extraction capabilities

Increasing outreach and collaboration by establishing and communicating with data user communities, maintaining online feedback mechanisms, and other means of expanding the audience for OJP research and data.

The infrastructure used to provide the OJP data archiving services must be FISMA and FedRamp compliant, ensure data redundancy, and create various formats of data for archiving. File formats currently created include: a fixed-length ASCII data file with variable-level metadata in the DDI XML schema; SAS; SPSS; and

STATA.

Data are managed and disseminated under different levels of restriction based on an analysis of their sensitivity.

In general, more disclosure limitation measures must be taken for files that are publicly accessible.

Data users agree to certain Terms of Use that stipulate that:

Data will be used only for statistical purposes and that the researcher should not attempt to identify a respondent.

Data users will indicate their compliance with Federal laws, regulations, and requirements.

Data users will provide assurance that their use of data will conform to widely-accepted standards of practice and legal restrictions.

The current methods of data access provided include:

Public-use files

Public-use files have been cleansed of all potentially identifying information–both direct (e.g., name) and indirect identifiers (e.g., date of arrest). These files are downloadable from the NACJD website. The current website includes the following features: search engine, variable-level searching, site map, traffic analysis tools, study home pages, study series pages, data download options, Frequently Asked Questions, and help documentation.

String variables create a unique disclosure review challenge for publicly available files. Direct identifiers need to be removed and indirect identifiers need to either: 1) be removed or 2) undergo some sort of disclosure limitation measure. For long strings, it is often not possible or practical to simply run a frequency and review the resulting output. In most cases, the value of the variables must be examined case by case. If only a public file is to be created (no restricted or enclaved files), the data producer can perform these disclosure limitation measures prior to sending the data to NACJD. Alternatively, NACJD has rigorous protocols in place for storing and processing data containing identifiers.

Online Data Analysis Tools

For some of the most accessed data, there is also an online data analysis tool, the Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA), which implements certain statistical procedures like computing frequencies, cross tabulations, comparisons of means, correlations, and OLS regression. The SDA tool provides access to public-use data.

Restricted-use files

Restricted-use files contain some indirect identifiers. To obtain access to restricted-use files, the researcher must submit a Restricted Data Use Agreement (RDUA). The applicant must provide documentation including but not limited to: a description of the research project; a signed certificate of confidentiality;

IRB approval; and data security plan. Once the researcher’s application is approved by both NACJD and BJS, an encrypted CD or secure download URL is provided.

Current services for managing and provisioning access to restricted data include:

Processing of requests for data use

Providing secure delivery of data files for authorized users

Monitoring compliance with restricted data use agreements

Answering queries about characteristics of restricted datasets

Monitoring and managing restricted data applications, legal agreements, data usage and users.

Virtual Data Enclave (VDE)

The Virtual Data Enclave (VDE) provides remote users with access to the latest versions of standard data analysis software, including SPSS, Stata, and SAS via virtual desktops and software-based authentication tokens. Non-academics (newspapers, government researchers, law firms, advocacy groups, anyone -academics included - located outside the U.S.) may access and analyze data in the VDE environment.

These users do not get possession of the actual data. Their output must be vetted by ICPSR/NACJD. They cannot save or print anything locally and all analyses and output stay on NACJD servers. Given these limitations placed on the user, a DOJ-approved privacy certificate is submitted in lieu of Internal Review Board (IRB) clearance for access.

Physical Enclave

Enclaved files contain one or more of the following: direct or indirect identifiers or highly sensitive data.

To obtain use of an enclaved file, the researcher must complete an application similar to that for restricted-use files. Upon approval of the application by NACJD and BJS, the researcher must travel to NACJD and work in the enclave. The enclave is a small suite of rooms with a few PCs connected to a stand-alone server. All external ports on the PCs have been disabled. The server is not connected to any university or external networks. The researcher cannot bring any electronic devices into the enclave suite, nor can he/she take anything out. Any printed analytic results will undergo disclosure review before being sent to the researcher.

TASK AREA 3: User Support and Outreach

The NACJD offers customized user support by phone and email. In addition, NACJD interacts with the user community by: hosting workshops and webinars, producing learning guides, and participating in conferences.

Specific tasks include:

Professional development of potential and ongoing researchers, practitioners, students, and other stakeholders in using crime and justice data in classrooms, careers, and policy decisions.

Developing data resource guide(s) to showcase select studies by organizing information on the topic as a starting place for researchers interested in that topic.

Providing technical assistance to users of archive resources, including OJP staff.

TASK AREA 4: Reporting

NACJD reports to OJP about major milestones and overall productivity indicators such as number of datasets released, time required to process studies, and any other requested information. There is an online tool that allows OJP to generate real-time and quarterly status reports which track receipt, archiving, processing, storage, and release of study data.

Requested Information

OJP is gathering information about the latest industry best practices, technologies, and innovations related to data management, archiving, and dissemination with the goal of modernizing its archiving approach and improving services for researchers and the public. In addition, OJP seeks to consolidate and share resources among its components to eliminate redundancy, increase coordination and reduce cost.

OJP anticipates awarding a time and materials contract to obtain services that meet the requirements described below. The contractor will be required to coordinate with a group of OJP contractors, analysts and technical staff working within a variety of different support organizations without adversely impacting existing workloads and commitments. Successful completion of this project will require full accountability to project requirements and timelines. The contractor must be attentive to detail, excel at making logistical arrangements and decisions, and be responsive to OJP's needs. Further, the contractor will continuously innovate and leverage new technologies while aligning with the OJP mission, architecture, programs, and the changing needs of researchers and data users. This will be a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that makes use of existing OJP systems and services, so the contractor may be required to coordinate with OJP to understand and receive training in the use of OJP systems and/or obtain clearance.

OJP is seeking information related to the following tasks:

i. Data management

ii. Data security

iii. Data curation

iv. Data analysis

v. Data dissemination

vi. Data discovery/mining

vii. Transitioning a data repository

viii. General Information

i. Data management

Approaches, technologies, methodologies and plans for:

Uploading, storing and managing data in highly accessible cloud environments while ensuring full data security and confidentiality protections commensurate with Federal data privacy laws like CIPSEA.

Migrating a data repository from one location to another and how those methods and prioritization of activities can ensure continuity of access and prevent versioning issues throughout the transition period

Identifying new datasets for inclusion in the archive

Managing NACJD data sharing agreements both for the data depositors and for researchers

Releasing new datasets and accompanying artifacts and notifying stakeholders

Instituting an effective disaster recovery plan

Creating and maintaining an up-to-date online bibliography of archive products

ii. Data Security

Providing electronic and physical security to restricted-use data

Processing, storing, securing and providing access to data containing different levels of sensitive information

Determining sensitivity of data and providing appropriate security for storage and access

Managing and monitoring users of and access rights to secure data

Tracking archived data from data provider through ingestion and curation to dissemination

Managing data providers, Principal Investigators (PI) and users for each archived study

iii. Data Curation

Approaches, technologies, methodologies and plans for:

Harnessing comprehensive metadata to increase automation of data ingest, preparation, and publishing to reduce the time required to produce and release statistics and research.

Curating data innovatively and preparing statistical analysis files and databases based on data analyst needs

Keeping track of curation materials

iv. Data Analysis

Developing tools to analyze confidential restricted-use data not available directly to any data analyst

Managing disclosure related sensitivities and output from of restricted-use data analysis tools.

Managing restrictions on confidential data including: a) the ability to restrict cross-tabulations to a set number of variables, b) the ability to suppress cells and tables depending on a set of statistical criteria, such as minimum cell sizes, numerator sizes, relative standard errors, marginal sizes c) the inability to list out cases from the data set d) the ability to prevent certain regressions which lead to disclosures (e.g., through the residuals), e) the inability to merge or link files

Managing sets of restrictions for different datasets

Providing tools to house confidential data

Providing tools to manage user applications, users and usage of confidential data while observing applicable laws like CIPSEA

Providing access to restricted use data including remote users and international users

Maintaining a metadata driven online data analysis tool for non-restricted data that:

Interfaces with complete and accurate codebooks

Allows computation of various statistics including cross tabulations (3-way at a minimum), means and linear and logistic regressions, standard errors, and variance estimation

Allows users to search through the metadata

Allows for download of data in various formats including SAS, R, SPSS, Stata, and ASCII (with record layouts/file formats.)

v. Data dissemination

Providing access to data in a variety of formats including downloadable multi-format datasets and the ability to perform on-line data analysis

Automating the export of data products to the web using archived microdata

Providing options for accessing, including remotely, “restricted” or sensitive data while adhering to security and confidentiality guidelines

Disseminating archives data through various outlets like web and APIs, including separate sites for each collection

vi. Data discovery/mining

Improving internal access to data resources by OJP staff and contractors for purposes of analysis, visualization, and discovery

Developing of data warehouses that support enhanced data discovery and mining opportunities in alignment with data archives metadata

Integrating the data archive and data warehouses

Providing and maintaining an official single source of information and database of record

vii. Data repository migration

Explain the process of transitioning a typical archive from the current system to a new one. Include:

Setting up the new system transitioning from the current archiving partner to the new service while maintaining provision of service to the public updating the archives with latest data while transitioning and to ensure the new archives is accurate, up to date and smoothly operational at transition end

Specify the preparatory tasks that OJP needs to undertake to ensure a smooth transition

Specify how you would address critical requirements for a smooth and successful transition, including:

Data versioning

Physical access to sites

Transition bandwidth

Physical data transfers of sensitive data

User training

Data loss prevention and risk mitigation

Files and document exchange systems

Transition communications

Address any post-transition considerations and tasks like data validation, acceptance testing, knowledge transfer and documentation

viii. General considerations

Explain your capabilities and experience in handling statistical data including:

implementing of statistical data standards processing large multi-dimensional datasets processing survey instruments and survey data performing statistical analyses and generating output in various statistical formats transforming datasets among multiple formats and standards availability of in-house statistical resources like data scientists, statisticians, archivists, social scientists, etc.

Explain the complexity and amount of effort expected of this task

Explain your plan and experience in providing documentation including user guides and webinars

Explain the process of establishing an architecture that makes OJP more agile and better able to adapt to change and supports continuous innovation

Explain the process of establishing flexible data services that feed multiple systems and facilities

Explain the plan for collecting and reporting on metrics to both streamline processes and evaluate utilization of data in order to optimize effectiveness of secondary analysis

Provide and explain the pros and cons to cloud-based archiving approaches like SaaS, PaaS, and total ownership

Provide and explain the pros and cons of content migration methodologies and tools for these kinds, size and complexity of data

Share any guidance that might be beneficial to OJP to conduct this effort

Share any experiences from a past migration, preferably related to statistical data archiving, you conducted like risks and lessons learned, and best management strategy

In addition to the above, please provide the following:

a) Vendor background summary including, contractor name, address, DUNS, point of contact information, email, phone, website address, small business designation, and any GSA schedule number.

b) Past Performance - Provide a list of previous contracts where similar services were provided. Provide customer/Government Agency contact information where these services were provided including: contact name and organization, telephone number, and email address.

The Government will evaluate market information to ascertain potential market capacity to provide services consistent in expertise, complexity, and scope described in this notice and otherwise anticipated.

Telephone inquiries will not be accepted or acknowledged, and no feedback or evaluations will be provided to companies regarding their submissions. Interested vendors should monitor a government point of entry site for further information.

Submission Instructions: Interested vendors who consider themselves qualified to perform the above-listed services are invited to submit a response to this RFI Notice by Friday, April 7, 2017 at 1:00PM EST. All responses under this RFI Notice must be emailed to debashis.nag@usdoj.gov.