NIST: Putting Together the Big Picture for the World Trade Center Disaster Investigation. “We needed to be able to organize this material in such a way that the stills and clips could quickly and easily be called up to answer questions. NIST researchers would want to know such things as where and when fire or smoke was visible inside specific parts of the buildings, what time particular windows were broken, and which areas appeared to resist fire spread. By the time NIST was officially assigned the responsibility for an investigation into the collapse of the WTC towers, we had already selected a digital asset management software system, thought out how a database might be used by researchers, developed search terms, and started to populate that database with early sets of photographs.”