NIPS format at NARA ADDENDUM
A description of the NIPS and de-NIPs file formats appears in National
Archives Reference Information Paper 90: "American Prisoners of War and Missing
in Action from the Vietnam War" (1995). The relevant paragraphs from Part III of
that publication (Electronic Records) follows:
III.3 Several of the data files in the Center for
Electronic Records were created by the Department of Defense (DoD) using an
early data base management system called the National Military Command System
Information Processing System 360 Formatted File System, commonly known as NIPS.
The data structure of NIPS files is hierarchical in that each data record is
composed of fixed, non-repeating data with one level of subordinating data. Each
record is of varying length and is usually organized into the following sets of
data elements: a Control Set, in which a unique record identifier is found, such
as operations report number; a Fixed Set, containing non-repetitive data; and
one or more types of Periodic Sets. Each type of Periodic Set may occur one or
more times. For instance, a military incident uniquely identified by an
operations report number may have more than one result. Therefore, a Periodic
Set named "Results" will occur more than one time in that specific record. In
addition, NIPS files can include Variable Sets that appear only when data is
present. These sets are usually "Comments" data in a free-text field of variable
length.
III.4 Some Vietnam-era files were
transferred to the National Archives in the software-dependent NIPS format
described above. The Center for Electronic Records has preserved a subset of
them in their native format while others the Center has "de-NIPS'd," or
reformatted to a zoned-decimal, flat-file format in standard IBM code, EBCDIC.
The "de-NIPS'd" files are no longer dependent on the NIPS software with which
they were created. Instead, as flat files, users can process and manipulate the
files using widely-available software applications.