OSTIblog Articles in the DOE Research & Development (R&D) Accomplishments Topic

Mutual Benefits at Work!

by Mary Schorn 23 Mar, 2011 in Products and Content

DOE OSTI recently hosted a graduate student from the University of Michigan (UM) School of Information (SI) for a week in our Germantown offices. The student, Ryan Tabor, was participating in the UM SI Alternative Spring Break (ASB) program, which matches graduate students with professional-experience projects identified by host organizations. Ryan's graduate school specialty area is human-computer interaction. That, coupled with his undergraduate degree in psychology and his work experience on IT Help Desks, created a great match for OSTI's project -- a usability study of DOE R&D Accomplishments.

Ryan tested and evaluated the site via various methodologies and reported his findings and recommendations. He provided some valuable insights which will result in an even more user-friendly website. This collaboration was mutually beneficial in that Ryan gained experience by working in a professional environment doing professional-level work and OSTI gained from having a 'third-party' review and feedback about one of its core products.

Mary Schorn

DOE R&D Accomplishments Brings You More!

by Mary Schorn 19 Jan, 2010 in Products and Content

To enhance the user's experience, multiple additions have been made to DOE R&D Accomplishments. These include

* *more information about the content of DOE R&D Accomplishments and a brief history of DOE and predecessors, available on a new About page,

* *additional ways to navigate -- via the faceted menu and the Menu Synopsis page, which contains menu items and links, each accompanied by a very brief description,

* *the ability to Share (at the top of each page), which provides the opportunity to share a DOE R&D Accomplishments web page,

* *and a blog, which provides comments about and calls attention to the multiple diverse aspects of the DOE R&D Accomplishments unique and specialized collection.

The new feature page is about Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin, whose landmark research and body of scientific work into how plants capture energy from the sun...

A Unique Insight into DOE Research Accomplishments: A Special Collection

by Mary Schorn 25 Aug, 2009 in Products and Content

Unique and interesting insights into U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Research and Development (R&D) accomplishments are available in a special collection that features research of DOE and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

This special collection contains historically significant government documents that have been specially selected and digitized to make them accessible via the Web. Landmark documents such as The Eightfold Way: A Theory of Strong Interaction Symmetry and The First Weighing of Plutonium are among approximately 300 specially-selected documents included in the database. Additionally, documents are aggregated with related aspects of the collection into more than sixty (60) Feature Topic pages with diverse topics such as Video Games -- Did They Begin at Brookhaven? and Human Genome Research: Decoding DNA.

The collection features a large number of DOE-associated Nobel Laureates and showcases a diversity in DOE research areas, including Solar Energy (with related educational materials) and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) that are used to power spacecraft.

Easy access to this unique collection is provided via...

DOE R&D Accomplishments Celebrates the Selection of Steven Chu for Secretary of Energy

by Mary Schorn 07 Jan, 2009 in Products and Content

Photo Credit:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Roy Kaltschmidt, Photographer

In conjunction with the recent selection of Dr. Steven Chu as the next United States Secretary of Energy by President-elect Barack Obama, a quality high-level compilation of information about Dr. Chu and his research has been made available on the web at http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/chu.html. This web page includes scientific documents that he authored, including his Ph.D. thesis supported by the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA); interviews, speeches, and presentations; and links to related web sites.

Dr. Chu has been director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) since August 2004 and received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light".

DOE R&D Accomplishments is a central forum for information about the outcomes of past DOE R&D that have had significant economic impact, have improved people's lives, or have been widely recognized as remarkable advances in science. Over sixty (60) pages featuring either DOE-associated scientists/Nobel Laureates and/or selected topics are available in addition to the feature page about Dr. Chu.

Mary Schorn

R&D Accomplishments Product Manager

Beyond Collecting: Connecting

by Dr. Walt Warnick 19 Nov, 2008 in Technology

by Walt Warnick and Sol Lederman

OSTI has embraced a new paradigm for sharing scientific and technical information (STI). Historically, OSTI has fulfilled its mission of providing STI to scientists, researchers, and the public by hosting, or collecting, documents and/or metadata. OSTI's new paradigm is to make content searchable that is often hosted by others; today, OSTI connects those seeking the content with the organizations that host it.

Beginning in the late 1940's, with OSTI's production of the Nuclear Science Abstracts - which was to go on for nearly 30 years, OSTI entered into the business of collecting information. Beginning in the 1990's, OSTI began creating web application to make the collected content openly accessible and conveniently searchable. ETDE Web, DOE Information Bridge, the Energy Citations Database, and DOE R&D Accomplishments are some of the successful applications.

In the last several years, OSTI's approach to disseminating STI has evolved. Recent applications such as the Eprint Network, Science.gov, DOE Science Accelerator, and WorldWideScience.org connect users with the highest quality science information without collecting or hosting it.

How does OSTI move beyond collecting to connecting and what does connecting mean? OSTI's new applications search content that is housed in document repositories owned by a number of government agencies and government-sanctioned organizations. OSTI applications search a number of these repositories on the fly and they aggregate the content from the sources they search and present the most relevant of the search results to the user. This simultaneous and real-time search of multiple repositories is called federated search. OSTI's federated search applications serve as...

Forms of STI - pt. 3

by Tim Byrne 23 Jun, 2008 in Products and Content

In the first two parts to this post (Forms of STI and Forms of STI - pt. 2), I talked about how there are different forms of scientific and technical information and each is published and disseminated in its own way. OSTI has different search tools to access the different types of STI. I also discussed technical reports, journal literature, conference proceedings and papers, and e-prints. After defining each of these types of STI, I described the OSTI products that searches each. This post will finish the discussion by covering patents, project summaries, and theses/dissertations.

Patents

Patents allow the spread of information about technological inventions while protecting the property rights of the inventor. A patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office excludes others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the U.S. or importing the invention into the U.S. for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention when the patent is granted. This public disclosure is extremely important in furthering scientific research. Technology moves on, but information remains useful forever

Thomas Jefferson, an inventor himself and appointed by George Washington to the first Patent Board, was, essentially, the first patent examiner. He found that "the issue of patents for new discoveries has given a spring to invention beyond my conception." (As a graduate of the University of Virginia, I always like to work in a Jefferson quote in my writings.)

DOE and its predecessor agencies, ERDA and AEC, are responsible for creating a tremendous amount of new technology....

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