Tag Archives: databases

NTIS offers RSS feeds by subject categories

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Currently the National Technical Information Service Bibliographic Database includes records on over 2.8 million scientific and technical reports arranged by major subject categories. The NTIS  has now made available RSS Feeds by Subject Category: Follow the RSS Feeds link at ntis.gov to get started. Energy is one of the categories, for example.

“NTIS values its recognition by the technical information community, libraries, and participating Federal Government agencies as the leader in providing must-have U.S. Government technical content. To this end, NTIS will always strive to acquire, index, abstract, and archive the largest collection of Government-sponsored technical reports in existence.”

The October 2008 issue of the NTIS Technical Reports Newsletter is now available online from http://www.ntis.gov/pdf/ntrnews4.pdf.  To subscribe to the free Newsletter, just send an email with your name and email address to ntrnews@ntis.gov.

Source, the October NTIS Technical Reports Newsletter

Free Patent Databases

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In response to a question put to the Engineering Division of the Special Libraries Association, Mike White at Queen’s University in Ontario, writes:

"For teaching and research purposes, the public patent databases are excellent resources. The quality and currency of the data is as good as the commercial sites. The patent office databases are updated weekly and most of the independent databases (FreePatentsOnline, Patent Lens, etc.) are current or no more than a week behind. My favorite is the EPO’s esp@cenet system. It’s user friendly, has tremendous content (60 million patents from 72+ jurisdictions) and an excellent classification search tool. I understand that they will be rolling out major enhancements to it sometime this fall. You might be interested in a comparison of free patent databases I posted recently on my blog."

PUL’s Patent Resources guide is linkable from the "Articles and Databases" cluster, under "P" or "patent".  ("Articles and Databases") is on the Library’s homepage.

Mike also notes that Thomson Reuters is rumored to have a powerful new patent searching database coming — for professional patent searchers.

World Wide Science database

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From Knowledgespeak Newsletter, June 18th:

"US DoE expands global science gateway – 18 Jun 2008

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information has announced that international science portal WorldWideScience.org has expanded its scope to include connections to databases and scientific web sites from over 44 nations.

WorldWideScience.org allows users to question over 200 million science and technology documents not indexed by popular search engines. The portal linked to 12 databases from 10 countries when it debuted in June 2007. The lately expanded service includes 32 national scientific databases and links to portals from 44 countries.

DOE and the British Library along with eight other participating countries first struck an agreement to establish the portal in January 2007. WorldWideScience.org gives science information consumers a single entry point for searching far-reaching science portals in parallel, with only one query, saving time and effort."

Caveat: 

IF YOU WANT A CERTAIN ARTICLE, FIRST CHECK THE PRINCETON ONLINE CATALOG FOR THE AVAILABILITY HERE.  (Then you may (1)download or print, (2) request via document delivery ,or (3)order directly on your own.)

As great as this service is, I must point out that you will be invited to purchase papers to which the Princeton University Library has already purchased subscriptions.   You will want to re -search for the full text article by article, probably most reliably via the online catalog.  (Alternatives would be the e-journals listing or the e-journal finder.)  Additionally, I must say that not all articles/papers are missed by the popular search  engines.