Everyone’s Library: How Norecopa Went from Floppy Disks to a National Centre

3Rs in Orbit circles the 3Rs and looks at them from different vantage points, alternating between the groups doing the work and the topics where the three Rs meet, collide, or get misread. Orbit, infinity, and beyond.

By Sally Thompson-Iritani

“We aim for the Norecopa website to be the global one stop shop for 3R resources.”

— Adrian Smith, Secretary of Norecopa

From far enough away, the world looks like a night sky. Then points begin to glow across the map, one after another, until separate efforts resolve into a constellation: 3R centres, laboratory animal science organisations, and networks around the world. Norecopa’s world map lets us see the pattern [norecopa.no/global3r]. Each point marks a place where people decided this work mattered. Together, those points reveal a global community, and Norecopa helps us see it and find one another. [1]

The Way In

Like a lot of people, I met Norecopa backwards. I knew PREPARE first.

I thought it was brilliant. It arrives exactly when the decisions that shape animal welfare and data quality are still open, which is to say it is good science. I have a slide about the PREPARE guidelines in almost every deck I give. Once, someone from Norecopa thanked me for the recognition, and my honest reaction was: thank me? Thank you. You are the ones who put it together and handed it to the rest of us. [1, 2]

PREPARE grew out of decades of daily contact inside real facilities with animal care staff, veterinarians, and scientists who plan and run the work. It also drew on the experience of preparing the Oslo veterinary school to become, in 2002, the first academic institution in the Nordic countries to hold AAALAC accreditation, and then maintaining it. Norecopa took that experience, hard won over decades, and published it in plain language for anyone to use. The PREPARE checklist has since been translated into thirty-eight languages. [2, 6]

PREPARE was my way in. To find Norecopa’s beginning, we have to go back more than three decades.

Forty Records for Starters

The year is 1991, and personal computers are new enough to still feel like a rumour. At the University of Bergen, a laboratory animal veterinarian named Richard Fosse is working out what these new machines can do for the field. He is building databases. He is also watching the first computer simulations appear, programs that let students learn what an experiment would teach without using an animal. And he sees what connects them: nobody can choose an alternative they do not know exists. [6]

So Fosse starts a list and hands it to Adrian Smith, who holds the Chair in laboratory animal science at the Oslo veterinary school. It has about forty records in it. Forty. With funding from the Norwegian Research Council, Smith hires Karina Smith, his wife, to go and find the rest. [6]

She finds thousands. In 1993, NORINA, the Norwegian Inventory of Alternatives, launches at the First World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences in Baltimore. It is the first gathering of its kind, and William Russell is there to watch the field finally take up the framework he and Rex Burch had published in 1959 to little notice. [1, 4]

NORINA is not the sleek thing the word database suggests today. It is an inventory of audiovisuals, gloriously of its moment: computer programs and CD-ROMs, yes, but also film loops, filmstrips, slide series, overhead transparencies, three-dimensional models, and classroom charts. Anything that could teach the material without using an animal, from junior school through university. [1, 5]

Karina Smith created NORINA and stayed with it for twenty-seven years. She built a second database as well, TextBase, for the literature of the field, and kept both alive until she retired in 2018. Elisabeth Pagels has maintained them since. [1, 5, 6]

Disks in the Post, a Mirror in Sydney

Then they had to get it to people. It was sold on floppy disks. Actual disks, in actual envelopes, with actual stamps. And because the database kept growing, every update meant another mailing.

Somewhere in Oslo, the global infrastructure of 3R resources was going out through the post office, one padded envelope at a time. Figure 1 follows one of those journeys end to end, from a catalogue on a floppy disk to an order placed by phone and fax to avoid using a single rat.

In 1996, sponsorship from Laboratory Animals Ltd. paid for an internet server, which solved the envelope problem and introduced a new one. The early internet was slow enough that a researcher in Australia might give up before the page finished loading. So the late Rees Griffiths, a biologist at Macquarie University, built a duplicate of the whole site and served it from a machine in Sydney, giving users in the Southern Hemisphere a faster way in [6].

Scattered, Then Gathered

At the same World Congress that introduced NORINA, two people met and found they had seen the same gap from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Adrian Smith and Tim Allen of the USDA’s Animal Welfare Information Center had both noticed that the information a scientist needs to plan a study and apply the 3Rs was out there, but scattered across guidelines, databases, journals, and email lists, and gathered nowhere. In Baltimore, they began to close that gap. Twelve years later, they published the first version of the list and turned it into a database. They called it 3R Guide and put it on the veterinary school’s website, because there was no Norecopa website to put it on. [1, 3]

Built on Consensus

Establishing Norecopa itself took longer. In 2000, a Ministry working group, led by Smith, concluded that Norway should have its own 3R centre, as fifteen other European countries already did. Parliament agreed. After several years under an interim arrangement, Norecopa was formally established in 2007. The name joins Nor, for Norway, to ecopa, the European Consensus Platform for Alternatives, an umbrella organisation that promotes the 3Rs across Europe. Ecopa brings together national platforms that give four voices a shared place in governance: government and regulators, academia, industry,
and animal welfare organisations. All four sit at the same table by design, so the platform represents the whole field rather than any single part of it. [6]

What it did not have was much money. The Ministry initially funded one position at half time. Years of patient lobbying eventually expanded the position to full time. Smith has held that role since 2007. The databases moved to Norecopa in 2011, when Smith left the veterinary school. Additional funding from animal welfare organisations, industry partners, and members of the laboratory animal science community made many of Norecopa’s resources possible. [1, 6]

The medium has shifted again, and this one was not planned. A growing share of Norecopa’s 400,000 hits a year now comes not from people but from AI systems in data centres around the world, reading the site and passing its contents on. Floppy disk, server, mirror, web, and now this: the library keeps finding new ways to travel. [6]

What Comes Next

Norecopa is about to see what it spent two decades working toward become real. Earlier this year, the government decided to establish a national 3R Centre in 2027. Run by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, it will have three permanent positions and possibly a fourth. It will maintain contact with Norway’s eighty research animal facilities, spread across a long, mountainous country. Fish and field research will be priorities. The Norecopa database will be its core resource, retaining the same name and domain. Figure 2 places that step in the full arc, from the people who built the work to the resources running before and after 2007 and the Centre now marked for 2027. [6] What becomes of Norecopa itself is not settled. It may continue as an organisation, or some or all of its functions may be carried forward within the Centre. There is, as Smith puts it, no hurry. [6]

“I have to retire from my present position on 31 December,” Smith says, “because I’ll be 72 in January and that’s the age limit for state employees.” He plans to stay on as a consultant for one reason: so the newsletters and the international calendar and the webinar series never skip a beat. After 35 years, his final task in the role is to make sure the work outlives his involvement without a stumble. [6]

Why It Matters

Norecopa has made an entire field visible and accessible. It gathers knowledge that might otherwise remain scattered and connects people and ideas that might otherwise remain apart. Because of that, we do not have to begin from nothing. We can look beyond our own corners of the field, draw on what others have learned, and carry the work forward together.

On Norecopa’s map, the people and organisations behind that work appear as points of light. Together, they form a constellation we can learn from, rely on, and become part of.

And if you have not clicked on that world map yet, go find it at norecopa.no/global3r. Then find your place in the constellation.