Sources Sought Notification for Library Support Modernization and Enhancement

This is a Sources Sought Announcement issued by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for informational and planning purposes only. This is NOT a solicitation, nor is it an announcement for a forthcoming solicitation. Submission of any information in response to this notification is purely voluntary. The Government assumes no financial responsibility for any costs incurred in providing a response.

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of five national libraries with a Congressional mandate to serve the citizens of the United States and serve as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s library. Most of the information provided to U.S. citizens and employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is made available over the Internet. With both a national and Departmental user group, the web interfaces, applications, and services must deliver better services to citizens and be secure, interactive, and utilize a modern technology stack.

NAL’s Information Systems Division (ISD, part of REE ITSD) provides programming and O&M support for the Library Support Programs. The purpose of the Library Support Programs is to accept publication and digital object metadata in various formats (XML, JSON), normalize them to a standard JSON format, enrich them with persistent identifiers, additional metadata from a variety of sources, mostly through API calls. The completed metadata packages will then get ingested into NAL’s integrated library system, which is an external SaaS product (Exlibris’ Alma), so that the data are available through the public search interface (Exlibris’ Primo, https://search.nal.usda.gov).

The project comprises several parts that interact with each other: (i) Complete the modernization of the library support programs; (ii) Integrate the Handle Microservice; create and integrate NALT Term Microservice; (iii) Integrate other services for metadata enrichment such as PubMed Central; (iv) Add public API for the PubAg component of the Integrated Library System’s search interface; (v) complete metadata harvests for Ag Data Commons.

The North American Industry Classification System code for this requirement is: 541511 - Custom Computer Programming Services Business Size $34 million. This is a 100% SMALL BUSINESS SET-ASIDE.

Please refer to the Statement of Work when providing information for this Sources Sought. Responses to this notification will help to determine the acquisition strategy for any future solicitation.

Submission Instructions: Interested vendors are invited to submit a response to this Sources Sought Notification by 12:00p ET on 23 April 2024, to the attention of David Jordan, Contracts Specialist, David.Jordan@usda.gov. All questions are asked to be submitted inwriting to the Primary Point of Contract and will be addressed accordingly.

Responses should be no more than 5 pages and include the following information:

1. Organization Name.

2. Contract Name, e-mail address and phone number.

3. Organizations SAM UEI number.

4. Business size status for the applicable NAICS code.

5. A statement of interest in any forthcoming acquisition.

6. A statement of capability to perform details of the requirement.

Interested vendors are instructed to provide only the data requested. No proprietary classified confidential or sensitive information should be included in your response. The Government reserves the right to use any nonproprietary technical information in any resultant solicitation(s). Any additional information will not be reviewed by the USDA.