U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Accelerating Science Discovery - Join the Discussion

OSTIblog Articles in the Information Bridge (IB) Topic

Join the discussion on important DOE research

by Michelle Turpin 07 Oct, 2008 in Products and Content

Our team is excited to announce that you can now join in or start discussions on important DOE research and development in the Information Bridge collection.

Our new social networking feature, Document Discussion, has been added to the Information Bridge to provide a forum for moderated, substantive commentary on DOE research and development. Users may perform a search at the Information Bridge site and then begin a discussion or add to a discussion about any of the documents in the results list returned. Authors of the research documents will be notified so that they may view and contribute to the discussion.

The Information Bridge is a core OSTI product featuring approximately 190,000 fully searchable DOE technical reports. Information Bridge serves over 3 million user transactions per month. We look forward to your contributions and to many dynamic discussions on your science topics of interest.

Michelle Turpin

Product Manager

Related Topics: doe, Information Bridge (IB), technical reports

More Energy Department research goes online due to OSTI, IAEA collaboration

by Brian Hitson 01 Oct, 2008 in Products and Content

Because we live in a digital world, many people mistakenly believe all research is easily available online. Not only is this a false assumption, it's not even an easy task to digitize the volume of research currently available in paper format and get it posted online.

That's why OSTI is pleased to announce that we've recently posted 15,000 DOE research reports heretofore only available in paper or microfiche. These important research documents are now easily accessible to researchers and the public via OSTI's Information Bridge.

This happened because of OSTI's longstanding participation in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) International Nuclear Information System (INIS). Prior to the days in which all technical reports were created in electronic media, OSTI, the U.S. member organization to INIS, sent DOE technical reports in microfiche to INIS. Recently an initiative launched by INIS, with IAEA funding, kicked into gear the digitization of legacy holdings from member nations.

Digitizing these documents affords INIS the opportunity to add this important research to the INIS database and provide the electronic files back to the member organizations for use in their own databases. Consequently, OSTI has added these electronic files to the DOE Information Bridge, increasing its size to nearly 190,000 reports, or 9 percent. The Information Bridge, a core OSTI product featuring DOE scientific output, performs over 3 million user transactions per month.

The OSTI/IAEA-INIS collaboration promises to yield even more digitized reports in the future, helping OSTI take important steps toward meeting the challenge of digitizing its 1 million document repository. So collaboration is paying dividends for researchers and the American public as U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research reports previously...

Related Topics: iaea, Information Bridge (IB), inis

OSTI is helping librarians make DOE R&D easier for library patrons to find

by Tim Byrne 18 Sep, 2008 in Products and Content

OSTI now offers librarians and others, free of charge, the opportunity to download records of DOE research and development (R&D) information in MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) format. Records are available for the full-text reports contained in the Information Bridge. By using OSTI's MARC records download librarians can easily expand access to a variety of scientific research straight from their online library catalogs.

OSTI MARC Records are derived from existing Information Bridge records. There are currently over 170,000 records in the Information Bridge. Options for downloading records include subject category, year and OSTI ID number.

Information Bridge provides free public access to full-text documents and bibliographic citations of DOE research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees. Legacy documents - including U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) documents dating back to the 1940s - and their MARC...

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....

Forms of STI - pt. 2

by 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...

Read more...

Forms of STI

by 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...

Approximately 10,000 DOE research documents added to the Information Bridge searchable database

by Michelle Turpin 17 Apr, 2008 in Products and Content

Our OSTI team recently completed digitizing and uploading to the Information Bridge database about 10,000 documents issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (from 1991 to 1994). This means that citizens can now search this database and rapidly download these documents in full text - all for free.

The exciting part? Previous to this upload, these documents were very difficult to find - either on the Internet or in hard copy.

Even more exciting? These documents bring the total Information Bridge Energy Department reports (issued from 1991 to present) to more than 165,000. This research is in science fields such as physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, etc.

OSTI plans to continue digitizing DOE legacy documents so that you can find even more science information on the Web.

The Information Bridge is a DOE Science Accelerator resource.

Michelle Turpin

Information Bridge Product Manager

OSTI

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