Scientific videos highlighting research and development (R&D) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are available on ScienceCinema. ScienceCinema uses innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology to enable users to quickly find video files produced by the DOE national laboratories, other DOE research facilities and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). When users search for scientific words and phrases, precise snippets of the video where the search term was spoken are provided along with a timeline.

More than 2,500 videos are currently available in ScienceCinema, and the database will continue to grow as new R&D-related videos are produced by DOE programs, labs and facilities and submitted to OSTI. Scientific videos, animations, interactive visualizations and other multimedia are expected to become an increasingly prominent form of scientific communications. ScienceCinema was recently recognized as one of DOE’s six new initiatives in the DOE Open Government Plan 2.0 for making the federal government more transparent, participatory and collaborative.