Introducing SciTech Connectby Mark Martin 02 Apr, 2013 in Products and Content
With the release of SciTech Connect, OSTI is expanding its deployment of semantic search, an innovative technology to improve the quality and relevance of search results across the majority of its DOE content. Semantic search is a way to enhance search accuracy contextually. Rather than relying on search algorithms that identify a specific query term, semantic search uses more complex contextual relationships among people, places and things. It is an especially effective search approach when a person truly is researching a topic (rather than trying to navigate to a particular destination). OSTI Director Walt Warnick has said this about SciTech Connect: “Now, with SciTech Connect, we are expanding deployment of innovative semantic search technology to make DOE R&D results easier to retrieve and thereby better serve our dual core mission – getting DOE results out to the scientific community and beyond, and getting the community’s results into DOE.” SciTech Connect contains all the full-text documents and citations previously found in Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database. Thus, SciTech Connect contains over sixty-five years of energy-related citations created and/or collected by OSTI. There are over 2.5 million citations, including citations to 1.4 million journal articles, 364,000 of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) linking to full-text articles on publishers’ websites. SciTech Connect also has over 313,000 full-text DOE sponsored STI reports; most of these are post-1991, but close to 85,000 of the reports were published prior to 1990. We are gradually phasing out Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database (more information). These products accounted for approximately half of the 298 million transactions OSTI handled in 2012. OSTI will work to ensure a smooth transition for patrons as it consolidates these... Related Topics: Energy Citations Database (ECD), Information Bridge (IB), SciTech Connect, STI reports Read more... |
OSTI by the numbersby Tim Byrne 02 Nov, 2012 in Products and Content
For those of you who like numbers, I thought I would give you a few numbers about some of OSTI’s databases and search products.
Related Topics: DOepatents, E-Print Network (EPN), Energy Citations Database (ECD), Energy Science and Technology Software Center (ESTSC), Information Bridge (IB), Science.gov, ScienceCinema, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
Science and a Movieby Kathy Chambers 18 Sep, 2012 in Science Communications
DOE’s ScienceCinema is now showing “A LANL Scientist’s Dream Takes Off to Zap Rocks on Mars” starring Roger Wiens. At age 9, Roger Wiens and his brother built rockets, a whole fleet of rockets. They also built a telescope that allowed them to draw craters they saw on Mars when it neared close to earth. Little did Roger know that he would be putting a camera on Mars 40 years later. Roger Wiens is now a LANL planetary scientist and the principal investigator of the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s ChemCam team. The ChemCam instrument fires a laser at Martian rocks and looks at the resultant flash to determine the composition. Data obtained from Chemcam is helping to answer the question of about life on Mars. Visit DOE’s ScienceCinema to catch Roger’s excitement along with a team of 40 people at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the collabortaion of the French Space Agency IRAP as the Curiosity rover reaches... Related Topics: Energy Citations Database (ECD), Los Alamos, Mars, ScienceCinema Read more... |
Wind Power Research Excitementby Kathy Chambers 06 Aug, 2012 in Science Communications
New simulation tools and data collection capabilities now available for wind power research are creating a lot of excitement and significant advances in the wind energy industry. For example, DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tripled previous estimates of U.S. wind power potential by using advanced wind mapping and validation techniques. New wind development areas were also identified where the wind resource was previously considered unsuitable. OSTI’s Energy Citations Database makes available a conference paper “State of the Art in Floating Wind Turbine Design Tools” that reviews simulation codes available to the offshore wind industry to potentially use deep water resources. Multi-megawatt wind turbines, complete with extensive sets of instrumentation, are now available to DOE and their partners to sustain wind technology development. Next-generation modeling tools are being used to assess individual turbine performance (see photo) as well as turbine-to-turbine interactions. And, Building State-of-the-Art Wind Technology Testing Facilities describes the capability to test blades up to 90 meters in length. Read more about the exciting wind power research in the OSTI Collections. ...Related Topics: Energy Citations Database (ECD), NREL, Wind Power Read more... |
Catch up on research info while you waitby Tim Byrne 13 Jun, 2011 in Products and Content Standing in line at the DMV, sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, commuting to work on the bus or train, waiting for a meeting to start, whenever and wherever you get the urge to do a little energy-related research, you can do so now with your mobile phone via OSTI Mobile at m.osti.gov. OSTI Mobile allows you to search technical reports, journal articles, conference papers, data files, multimedia, software, project summaries, patents, and e-prints from a number of OSTI databases, including Energy Citations Database, Information Bridge, ScienceCinema, DOepatents andDOE Green Energy. Search results for a variety of resource types are available, or the results can be limited to specific formats. You can search for videos highlighting scientific research from Department of Energy (DOE) labs and CERN found in ScienceCinema. Innovative patents resulting from DOE-sponsored research appearing in DOEpatents can be found. Choose your search terms to retrieve citations on renewable energy and energy efficiency from DOE Green Energy. Close to 280,000 full-text STI reports are easily accessible, and over 2.4 million energy-related citations are conveniently available whenever and wherever. OSTI Mobile is also helpful if you just want to learn more about OSTI. Navigation buttons guide you to mobile versions of several OSTI sites. OSTI News will give you... Related Topics: DOE Green Energy, DOepatents, Energy Citations Database (ECD), Information Bridge (IB), mobile, OSTI Mobile, OSTI Youtube Channel, ScienceCinema Read more... |
What's in the OSTI Legacy Collection?by Tim Byrne 20 Mar, 2009 in Products and Content The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information legacy collection contains an estimated one million technical reports representing six decades of energy research that is, for the most part, unavailable in electronic format. On average, OSTI receives close to two hundred requests each month to digitize specific reports, with the vast majority of the requests coming from DOE employees and contractors. The legacy collection represents an enormous investment in research and development from the Atomic Energy Commission, Energy Research and Development Administration and Department of Energy. With the growing tendency of many researchers to rely solely on research information available electronically, this incredibly valuable resource collection is often ignored. By not having electronic access to previous research, scientific advancement may be diminished and funds wasted duplicating what has already been done.
OSTI has recently implemented the Adopt-a-Doc program that allows the general public to pay for the digitization of a document of their choosing. Documents in need of digitization can be identified by searching the Energy Citations Database and clicking on the Materials available for digitization box on the Fielded Search window. This is proving to be a popular service. Unfortunately, with the level of digitization that OSTI can currently handle, it will take a very long time to digitize the entire legacy collection.
The birth of the OSTI legacy collection really began with the declassification and distribution of reports from the Manhattan Project. Following the end of World War II, our nation was inquisitive and interested in the government's hitherto top-secret program on... Related Topics: Adopt-A-Doc, AEC, digitization, doe, Energy Citations Database (ECD), erda, legacy collection, Nobel Prize, osti Read more... |
Beyond Collecting: Connectingby 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... Related Topics: DOE Research & Development (R&D) Accomplishments, Energy Citations Database (ECD), ETDEWEB, mission, sti Read more... |
Forms of STI - pt. 3by 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.... Related Topics: dissertations, DOE Research & Development (R&D) Accomplishments, DOE Research and Development (R&D) Project Summaries, E-Print Network (EPN), Energy Citations Database (ECD), Energy Files, Federal R&D Project Summaries, Information Bridge (IB), osti, patents, project summaries, sti, theses Read more... |
Forms of STI - pt. 2by Tim Byrne 20 Jun, 2008 in Products and Content In the first part to this post, Forms of STI, I talked about how there are different forms of scientific and technical information and how each is published and disseminated in its own way. OSTI has different search tools to access the different types of STI. In the last post I discussed technical reports. Now I will cover journal literature, conference proceedings and papers, and e-prints, defining each and pointing out the OSTI search tools that covers each. Journal literature: The publication of research in scientific journals started in the mid seventeenth century. Before that and for some time after, scientific and technical information was circulated via letters, printed tracts and books. Journals became a preferred medium because journal publishers worked to achieve wider dissemination and faster publication. Today, however, even with the tremendous growth in scientific journals in the later half of the twentieth century, publishing in scientific journals is most often not a speedy process. It can often take a year of more for an article to be published once it has been accepted by a journal. For this reason, many scientists and engineers also utilize other means to share their research. Options include technical reports, conference papers, pre-prints and a growing use of e-prints. From 1948 to 1976, the Atomic Energy Commission published Nuclear Science Abstracts, providing comprehensive indexing of the international nuclear science literature, including journal literature on a worldwide basis. This literature can now be found using Energy Citations Database. ECD... Related Topics: conference papers, conference proceedings, E-Print Network (EPN), e-prints, Energy Citations Database (ECD), Energy Files, Information Bridge (IB), journal articles, osti, Science Conference Proceedings, Science.gov, sti Read more... |
Forms of STIby Tim Byrne 19 Jun, 2008 in Products and Content A comment I have heard on numerous occasions is that OSTI has a too many databases and search tools and it is difficult to know which to use. Well, I am sure that a lot of people do find the variety of OSTI resources to be a bit confusing, but it really takes different types of databases and search tools to cover all the different types of scientific and technical information (STI). Scientific and technical information has many forms, such as journal articles, technical reports, patents and e-prints. Each has its own publication route which requires its own method of acquisition. A traditional library is built by compiling a collection of books and periodicals for use by library patrons. In the electronic world, collections have expanded beyond the walls of the library. OSTI is able to create two different types of electronic collections. The first type is more like a traditional library in that OSTI compiles a collection of STI produced by or funded under the provenance of the Department of Energy on an OSTI computer. OSTI controls what goes into these collections and in what format. The OSTI databases that are of this sort include the full text documents in the Information Bridge and the bibliographic citations and summaries created for the Energy Citations Database, DOEpatents, and the DOE R&D Project Summaries. The second type of electronic collection is a virtual collection of STI outside of DOE. These collections contain STI that is of interest to DOE, but, for the most part, is not produced by DOE. The citations and full text documents in these virtual collections reside on the Internet in servers all over the world. OSTI has identified the locations of the STI and provides a means to search... Related Topics: conference papers, conferences, DOE Research and Development (R&D) Project Summaries, DOepatents, E-Print Network (EPN), e-prints, Energy Citations Database (ECD), Information Bridge (IB), journal articles, patents, proceedings, project summaries, Science Accelerator, Science Conference Proceedings, Science.gov, sti, technical reports, theses, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
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