More Teachers, More Opportunities!by Linda McBrearty 05 Feb, 2010 in Products and Content There was good news coming from the University of Tennessee (UT) and the State of Tennessee in 2009! A $1.8 million grant was announced that will help put more math and science teachers into Tennessee schools! This program, called VolsTeach, is designed to meet the increasing need for more math and science teachers. It provides paid internships and interesting community outreach activities and opportunities. This indicates a proactive, forward way of thinking and a dedication to education at the state level in Tennessee where the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is located and where we can help in a “hands on” manner! OSTI’s EDU Outreach Program (partly through the .EDUconnections webpage) not only focuses on supporting universities, and community colleges, but also teachers, principals and librarians at high schools throughout the country. OSTI’s online resources provide an incredible wealth of scientific and technical information at the click of a mouse. Another program, Teach Here, is a teaching residency program for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals who are moving into secondary careers in education to help with teaching shortages. This program is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant and the Americorps. OSTI also teams with NSF on websites such as Science.gov to provide the best in science and technology information available from government... Related Topics: .EDUconnections, Science.gov, University of Tennessee
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Science.gov Enhancementsby Valerie Allen 27 Jan, 2010 in Products and Content Science.gov has an updated look this week to make room for enhancements. The enhancements will both faciliate use and awareness of Science.gov and highlight findings and activities of the participating agencies. Want to share or save a permanent link on Science.gov via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook? There is now a sharing and bookmarking toolbar on the main Science.gov page as well as on each subject page . Science in the News is a new feature providing current news from many of the participating Science.gov agencies. Aggregated headlines from agency RSS feeds scroll on the Science.gov page, allowing users to keep up with agency news by consulting just one location. The most current headlines are on the main Science.gov page while headlines from the past several days are continued on a separate page. Headlines are linked to the full agency information. Current agencies providing RSS feeds to the aggregated feed are: Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Department of Education, Federal Resources for Educational Excellence Department of Energy Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Department of Health and Human Services, NLM MedlinePlus Department of Interior, U.S. Geological Survey Department of Transportation Environmental Protection Agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration National Science Foundation More Science.gov agency RSS feeds will be integrated soon, so keep watching! Valerie Allen Science.gov webmanager Related Topics: doe, dot, fda, nist, rss, Science.gov Read more... |
The X-Portal Vision of the Futureby Peter Lincoln 05 Oct, 2009 in Technology As OSTI Director Walt Warnick likes to say, today's Web is like the Model T Ford -- revolutionary but ready for vast improvement. This is especially true when it comes to making the Web work for science and technology. In that spirit I want to describe a new kind of Web Portal, one which has yet to be built. It is called the X-Portal. An X-Portal provides comprehensive coverage for a specific science or technology community, where X refers to that community. In other words, an X-Portal for biofuels is a comprehensive biofuels portal. X = Neutron Science gives a comprehensive neutron science portal, and so on. There can be as many X-Portals as there are communities, but each has a similar design. The need for X-Portals The need for X-Portals is based on the fact that today's search engines and portals typically provide less than 5% coverage of any given science community. Today's Web portals and search engines, while revolutionary, are technologically immature and far from comprehensive. As a result they do relatively little to overcome the cognitive barrier of findability. One can usually find something relevant, but it is seldom the best thing out there. With 5% coverage the odds are 19 to 1 against finding the best accessible content. Moreover, if the coverage extends to a large number of other communities, as with Google, even that 5% may be swamped by hits on other communities. There are two principal reasons for these deficiencies. First of all today's portals try to be too broad, so they wind up being shallow. This means they only capture a small fragment of any given technical community. Second, because they are so broad they cannot make use of the emerging technologies of federation, semantic analysis, mapping and visualization. These new technologies require a certain amount of analytical effort that is specific to each community. When the content is too broad these technologies are prohibitively difficult to apply. ... Related Topics: federated search, Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org (WWS), x-portal Read more... |
OSTI's Web Metrics - Partially Measuring Successby Mark Martin 24 Sep, 2009 in Technology OSTI creates and deploys web-based information products to accomplish its mission. One way to measure the success of this approach is to use web metrics to gauge and analyze the usage of the information we disseminate via our web- based products. An "information transaction" is the largest and most broadly defined web metric we track at OSTI. We define an information transaction as a discrete information exchange between an information patron and OSTI's suite of web-based information services. An information transaction occurs when our web servers deliver information to satisfy a user's request. Requests can take a variety of forms. Sometimes a user's request might be a search of a product such as Science Accelerator that brings back a hit list. Following up on this information transaction, a user might click on an item in the hit list to call up a single bibliographic citation delivered via a component database of Science Accelerator such as the Information Bridge or Energy Citations Database. Next, the user might call up the full text of a technical report. Another type of information transaction would occur when a user requests tens, hundreds, or thousands of bibliographic citations via our OAI or MARC xml services. In 1994, OSTI launched and hosted the first DOE web home page. From this small web presence, OSTI served 300,000 information transactions. In FY 2008, OSTI served over 84,000,000 information transactions, a 28,000% increase. While information transactions are of great use and give us a great metric relative to information dissemination, it is useful to more... Related Topics: Information Bridge (IB), Information Bridge MARC Records, marc, mission, Science Accelerator, Science.gov Read more... |
Science.gov's Unique Collaborationby Valerie Allen 14 Sep, 2009 in Products and Content Science.gov is a one-stop portal for federal government science information. Over 200 million pages of science information from 14 federal agencies may be searched through a single query. How far we have come in the past decade! You may not be aware that Science.gov was developed and is governed by the Science.gov Alliance, a group of science information managers who began working together to overcome the stovepipes of agency information in 2001. This unusual collaboration has taken a bottom-up approach throughout the development and operation of the site. All participating agencies have an equal voice in the process; all agencies manage their own content through a decentralized content management model. In addition, agencies maintain their own databases which are searched by Science.gov in real-time. I am pleased to note that the Science.gov Alliance and their "out of the box" techniques have served the science attentive citizen well for almost 7 years! Valerie Allen Related Topics: Science.gov, science.gov alliance Read more... |
OSTI's Pioneering Technology Effortsby Mark Martin 24 Jul, 2009 in Technology A typical misconception I face when I tell people that I work within the government is that they think my job, even though it is in the technology arena, must move at a snail's pace relative to the commercial sector. This preconceived notion that our government crawls along relative to technology adoption and innovation - at least in my experience - is way off the mark. Here at OSTI we can cite several examples where we have been on the bleeding edge of technological development. Not only have we been on the bleeding edge, in some cases we have been on that bleeding edge in cooperation with some of the largest, most innovative technology companies in the world. For example, OSTI has been a pioneering force in federated search technology since the late 1990s. Federated search, for those of you new to the term, is the simultaneous search of multiple online databases or web resources from a single query. The Wikipedia article on federated search is an excellent resource for more information on exactly how federated search works. Before the term "federated search" had been coined, OSTI was implementing pioneering technology that would come to be known as federated search. In April 1999, OSTI launched EnergyPortal Search, a product now encompassed in EnergyFiles. EnergyPortal Search was the first federated search application deployed by OSTI and the first product of its kind in the government. In December 2002, OSTI launched Science.gov, the first ever search capability across major science agencies. In June 2007, OSTI introduced the concept of WorldWideScience.org, which searches across national and international... Related Topics: Energy Files, federated search, milestones, Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
Tool Supports OSTI Mashupsby Mary Schorn 14 Jul, 2009 in Products and Content Did you know that science information is available via web "mashups"? Web "mashups" combine multiple products/services into a single application for the purpose of consolidating information with an easy-to-use interface. The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) uses "mashups" to return search results from Science Accelerator, Science.gov, and WorldWideScience.org. These "mashups" include external sources of information, in these cases from Wikipedia and EurekAlert!, that are provided as a service to the user for help with additional background information or with the ability to further study their topic. These "mashups" are made possible by OSTI's use of a federated search to perform all-encompassing searches of important databases and collections. Science Accelerator searches U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) databases of scientific and technical information representing billions of dollars of DOE research. Science.gov searches U.S. government agency scientific databases and web pages. WorldWideScience.org searches national and international scientific databases and portals. Federated searching provides each of the three products with one-stop simultaneous searching of multiple networked data resources via a single query. When a query is entered, it is sent to selected databases, collections, and/or web portals that are available for searching. The individual data resources send back results, which are ranked in relevance order and are provided to the user as "mashups". Users can examine these "mashups" to find specific results that contain information that is useful to... Related Topics: doe, mashup, osti, Science Accelerator, Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
It's been a big summer for sharing science info--and it's still only June!by Cathey Daniels 30 Jun, 2009 in Products and Content
Did you know:
And did you know that now you can more easily let us know what you think about our... Related Topics: Adopt-A-Doc, OSTI Youtube Channel, Science Accelerator, Science.gov, SciTech Connect, youtube Read more... |
On Credibility of Search Resultsby Sol Lederman 10 Mar, 2009 in Personal Perspectives On March 2nd I wrote an article for the Federated Search Blog: On credibility of search results. Related Topics: federated search, Science Accelerator, Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
Introducing Science.gov 5.0by Valerie Allen 15 Sep, 2008 in Products and Content Science.Gov 5.0 is now available! The first thing you'll notice is the new main page design. The same elements are there, but reconfigured to update the website look and feel. We have also added seven deep web sources (see DOE press release) into the search. If you're a frequent user of Science.gov, you may have had a hand in the recent enhancements. Many of the new Science.gov 5.0 technical features are in response to past suggestions from Science.gov users. Topic "clustering" is available on the Science.gov results so you can drill down into subtopics to focus your research. Presented alongside the Science.gov results is auxiliary information from the AAAS EurekAlert! Science News and from Wikipedia. Also new with this version is the ability to download search results into your citation management software - a specific request from the library community. You will also notice a new Alerts interface which allows you to set up an ATOM or RSS feed of your Alerts. The Science.gov Alliance has released a major version of Science.gov each year since its launch in December 2002. We continue that tradition with the newest release, realizing that both technology and R&D results from U.S. federal government continue to grow at a very significant pace. The Science.gov Alliance is itself an interesting story, a truly unique example of federal agencies overcoming "stovepipes" to create a true cross-agency portal. You may read more information on this initiative and its participants on http://www.science.gov/about.html. OSTI hosts and manages the Science.gov site for the Science.gov Alliance. I do hope you find the upgraded features of our Version 5.0 helpful. We'... Related Topics: alerts, rss feed, Science.gov, science.gov alliance Read more... |
Accelerating Science Discovery - Join the Discussion
