Tag Archives: databases

Search Engines, etc. for finding Free Online STEM Resources

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“Search Engines and Beyond: A Toolkit for Find­ing Free Online Resources for Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy and Engi­neer­ing“
By Nedelina Tchangalova and Francy Stil­well, Uni­ver­sity of Maryland

in the Spring, 2012 issue of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Librar­i­an­ship  [ http://www.istl.org/ ]

NTIS launches National Technical Reports Library Version 3.0 — 16 May 2012

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“The National Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice (NTIS) of the U.S. Depart­ment of Com­merce has announced the launch of the next gen­er­a­tion National Tech­ni­cal Reports Library Ver­sion 3.0, also known as NTRL V3.0.

The NTRL V3.0 is now pub­licly avail­able after two years of research and devel­op­ment. Through the util­i­sa­tion of the open-source plat­form Fedora/SOLR, the NTRL V3.0 builds upon the suc­cesses of pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions by offer­ing the pub­lic online access to the large NTIS repos­i­tory of sci­en­tific and tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion through the use of enhanced func­tion­al­i­ties, fea­tures and improved display.

The NTIS repos­i­tory con­sists of over 2 mil­lion bib­li­o­graphic records rep­re­sent­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in federally-funded research per­formed over the past 70 years with a broad scope of Sci­en­tific, Tech­ni­cal & Engi­neer­ing Infor­ma­tion (STEI) sub­ject cov­er­age. NTIS sought to improve dis­sem­i­na­tion of STEI, and eco­nomic, social and envi­ron­men­tal infor­ma­tion by per­ma­nently enlarg­ing, pre­serv­ing and pro­vid­ing ready access to its repository.

The NTIS seeks to actively col­lect, pre­serve and dis­sem­i­nate STEI and other infor­ma­tion thereby sup­port­ing the Depart­ment of Com­merce mis­sion to pro­mote U.S. eco­nomic growth by pro­vid­ing access to infor­ma­tion that stim­u­lates inno­va­tion and dis­cov­ery. The NTRL V3.0 rep­re­sents the NTIS com­mit­ment to ensur­ing access to this invalu­able repos­i­tory is afford­able, con­ve­nient, and widely avail­able to the aca­d­e­mic, cor­po­rate, library and gov­ern­ment com­mu­ni­ties, and to the public-at-large.

The NTRL V3.0 was devel­oped by the Fed­eral Sci­ence Repos­i­tory Ser­vice (FSRS) a public-private part­ner­ship between NTIS and Infor­ma­tion Inter­na­tional Asso­ciates, Inc. (IIa) of Oak Ridge, TN. The intent of the public-private part­ner­ship was to cre­ate an Insti­tu­tional Repos­i­tory (IR) Ser­vice for fed­eral agencies.”

Source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, May 16, 2012

TRY, Initiative on Plant Traits — database

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Wel­come to the TRY Ini­tia­tive on Plant Traits

Quan­ti­fy­ing and scal­ing global plant trait diversity

A net­work of veg­e­ta­tion sci­en­tists jointly headed by
DIVERSITAS, IGBP and the Max Planck Insti­tute for Bio­geo­chem­istry

Main objec­tives:

  • Con­struc­tion of a global data­base of plant func­tional traits
  • Make the data avail­able for the eco­log­i­cal community
  • Sup­port the design of a new gen­er­a­tion of global veg­e­ta­tion models

There is a link to a detailed arti­cle which has just been pub­lished in Global Change Biol­ogy.

Database of Genomic Structural Variation (dbVar)

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From NIH News: “The National Insti­tutes of Health today announces the launch of a new resource, called the Data­base of Genomic Struc­tural Vari­a­tion, or dbVar, to help sci­en­tists under­stand how dif­fer­ences in DNA con­tribute to human health and dis­ease.”.

Thanks to Tara Cal­ishain and her newslet­ter, Research­Buzz, Octo­ber 4, 2010

OSTI, the science & technology portal of the U.S. Government

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OSTI, the Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Infor­ma­tion is worth book­mark­ing.  It serves as a por­tal for most of the fed­eral goverment’s infor­ma­tion, reports and data for 18 agen­cies:

Agriculture,Commerce, Defense, Edu­ca­tion, Energy, Health & Human Ser­vices, Inte­rior, Trans­porta­tion, Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, Library of Con­gress, National Aero­nau­tics & Space Admin­is­tra­tion, National Archives & Records Admin­stra­tion, National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, and the US Gov­ern­ment Pub­li­ca­tions Office.

Ter­mi­nol­ogy and the­sauri might help in your infor­ma­tion searches.

This site is a gate­way to DOE col­lec­tions at ScienceAccelerator.gov, global sci­ence via WorldWideScience.org, sci­en­tific research data as an open gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tive, and the OSTIblog.

Much of this, they declare, is out­side Google’s purview — in the “deep web.”

Free alerting service now available via “DOE Science Accelerator”

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“Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies pow­ers alert ser­vice in DOE Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor — 31 Mar 2010

Fed­er­ated search ser­vices provider Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies, US, has announced that its Explorit Research Accel­er­a­tor tech­nol­ogy is pow­er­ing a new alerts ser­vice for sci­ence researchers via the DOE Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor. With the new ser­vice, researchers can expect to receive infor­ma­tion about new DOE resources rel­e­vant to them.

Users of the free ser­vice cre­ate a per­son­alised pro­file of searches related to their areas of inter­est. The ser­vice per­forms these searches on users’ behalf every week and e-mails the users noti­fi­ca­tions of newly pub­lished results.

Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor is pro­jected as a gate­way to DOE-related sci­ence infor­ma­tion, includ­ing R&D results, project descrip­tions, accom­plish­ments and other author­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion, via resources made avail­able by the US Depart­ment of Energy’s Office of Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion (OSTI). The ser­vice searches 10 major DOE data­bases and por­tals, includ­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of full-text doc­u­ments going back to 1991 and many more cita­tions going back to the Man­hat­tan Project era. Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor resources are incor­po­rated into Science.gov, also hosted by OSTI. Science.gov is incor­po­rated into another prod­uct main­tained by OSTI, WorldWideScience.org. This is expected to expose Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor resources to a global audience.

OSTI cre­ated Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor and intro­duced it to the pub­lic in April 2007. Explorit, Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies’ fed­er­ated search sys­tem, allows Sci­ence Accel­er­a­tor users to search the 10 data­bases simul­ta­ne­ously in real-time and from a sin­gle search box. Rel­e­vant results from all sources are com­pared against one another, ranked for rel­e­vance, and dis­played in a sin­gle search results page.”

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newsletter

Scitopia now with streamlined links to RefWorks

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“Fed­er­ated search ser­vices provider Deep Web Tech­nolo­gies, US, has announced that its fed­er­ated search prod­uct, Explorit Research Accel­er­a­tor, now includes seam­less inte­gra­tion with Ref­Works, a web-based solu­tion for cita­tions management.”

source: Knowl­edge­s­peak Newslet­ter, July 30, 2009

Sci­topia was devel­oped by 21 top tech­no­log­i­cal and sci­en­tific soci­eties.  It is a freely avail­able data­base mainly in physics and engi­neer­ing.  Com­po­nent soci­eties are listed on a web­page off www.scitopia.org.  It lists papers going back as early as 1665, some of which are digitized.

Full text is offered on a pay-per-view basis, so cur­rently it is bet­ter to search Princeton’s sub­scrip­tion data­bases which have links to our full-text sub­scrip­tion resources.  INSPEC  and Com­pen­dex  cover even more resources than Sci­topia.  IEEE  — Xplore & IEL – are other over­lap­ping sub­scrip­tion data­bases we have, and they are com­pletely full-text.

DOE’s Office of Scientific &Technical Information has new look and improved navigation

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“The web­site for the Depart­ment of Energy Office of Sci­en­tific and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion (OSTI) is sport­ing a fresh look with improved nav­i­ga­tion path­ways to our prod­ucts and ser­vices.  Direct links to ScienceAccelerator.gov, Science.gov, and WorldWideScience.org are fea­tured, as well as a list­ing of DOE data­bases by con­tent type. Our new fea­tures, Sci­ence Show­case and From the Direc­tor, high­light excit­ing ideas, sci­ence infor­ma­tion, tools and ser­vices. Our Sug­gested Tags cloud pro­vides ideas on how to tag our web­site infor­ma­tion and offers an easy path to users’ favorite pages. Our inter­ac­tive fea­tures can be found in the Read, Lis­ten and Share box. While we know there will be a learn­ing curve, we hope you find the OSTI web­site more in tune with the needs of today’s web users.”

Let us know what you think.

www.osti.gov

From Tim Byrne at OSTI, to the Sci­ence & Tech­nol­ogy Divi­sion of SLA, via direct email.

VADLO — a search engine for the Life Sciences

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VADLO search engine, devel­oped by 2 biologists, caters to all branches of bio­med­i­cine and life sci­ences. Searchers may delve within five cat­e­gories: Pro­to­cols, Online Tools, Sem­i­nars, Data­bases and Software.

“Pro­to­cols cat­e­gory will let you search for meth­ods, tech­niques, assays, pro­ce­dures, reagent recipes, plas­mid maps, etc. Online Tools will cater cal­cu­la­tors, servers, pre­dic­tion tools, sequence align­ment and manip­u­la­tion tools, primer design etc. Sem­i­nars are essen­tially pow­er­point files for pre­sen­ta­tions, lec­tures and talks. Data­bases will take you to, well, data­bases, resources, com­pi­la­tions, lists etc. It is here that you can also search for your favorite genes and pro­teins. Soft­ware cat­e­gory is for bioin­for­mat­ics experts who are look­ing for codes, scripts, algo­rithms, exe­cuta­bles, down­load­able pro­grams and collaborations”

Direct to VADLO

Taken from the VADLO site, and repro­duced in the lat­est ResourceShelf Newslet­ter, No. 397.

Technical Report & Image Library — TRAIL

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I just learned of this data­base of tech­ni­cal reports housed at Manoa, Univ. of Hawaii, via the Chem­i­cal Infor­ma­tion List­serv — from the Univ. of Arkansas’ Engi­neer­ing and Math Librarian.

“TRAIL-Technical Report Archive and Image Library: a col­lab­o­ra­tive project to dig­i­tize, archive, and pro­vide per­sis­tent and unre­stricted access to fed­eral tech­ni­cal reports issued prior to 1975.”

Actu­ally, they have reports from much later than 1975.  Brows­ing is available, as well as detailed search functionality.

STATISTICS:

  • Total reports in data­base: 1052
  • Total full­texts in data­base: 330
  • Total images in data­base: 946

Orga­ni­za­tions Involved:
The Greater West­ern Library Alliance (GWLA — www.gwla.org) and the Cen­ter for Research Libraries (CRL — www.crl.edu) are col­lab­o­rat­ing on a pilot project.

These are picked up by Google, not (nec­es­sar­ily?)  Google Scholar, and not by Scirus. Sco­pus and  U.S. Gov­ern­ment data­bases will pick up (index) the reports, but prob­a­bly won’t link to the full texts.