ITA? Deja vu of OTA.

Three months after the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) mailed out its final reports, a small group of its alumni received their first grant-$50,000 from an anonymous donor-to pick up where the abolished research agency had left off. This new Institute for Technology Analysis (ITA) in Washington, D.C., expects to be leaner than its predecessor (SN: 10/28/95, p. 286) and more catholic in its clientele. Whereas OTA had worked solely for Congress, ITA plans to analyze issues for industry, professional societies, and federal agencies.

Vary Coates, the president of ITA, and several other former OTA analysts met with potential clients over the past 6 months to identify likely projects, including one on digital cash, and to outline plans for studying them. The institute could launch several projects as soon as it locks in some additional financial sponsors for them, Coates says.

Following OTA's precedent, ITA intends to investigate problems and policy options through workshops at which all vested parties are represented. Owing to ITA's smaller budget, however, Coates anticipates that there will be fewer workshops per project and that final reports will run 50 pages or less, a fraction of the length of the average OTA tome.

The entire library of OTA reports-all 750 or so, which span 23 years and run more than 100,000 pages-has just become available as a boxed set of five CD-ROMs from the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C., for $23.