NSRL is part of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). One of the main uses of the NSRL database is for digital forensics. For example, if an investigator needs to scour a hard drive, s/he can do what's known in the forensics world as "de-NISTing" -- apply the NSRL images to the drive to automatically remove what's guaranteed NOT to be relevant data. That way there's a much smaller data set to worry about. De-NISTing is also common in civil litigation as part of the electronic discovery process.