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

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”

"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

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

"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.

Science.gov now provides 200 million pages

 

Science.gov is a free, integrated single-search gateway to reliable science and technology information from 17 organizations within 13 federal science agencies. In this new 5.0 version,  launched on Sept. 15th, there are 7 additional portals or databases that quadruple its content.  New content includes patents, toxicology data, e-prints from the Dept. of Energy and OSTI, and journal archives from PubMed Central, and Cancer.gov.

The search engine is improved with clustering technology, and Science.gov now provides links to science news, the EurekAlert! and Wikipedia. 

"Science.gov is hosted by DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), within DOE’s Office of Science. In addition to DOE, Science.gov is supported by contributing members of the Science.gov Alliance, including the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, and the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Government Printing Office, the Library of Congress, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation, with support from the National Archives and Records Administration."

From Tim Byrne at osti/gov

 

 

 

DOE Data Explorer — online scientific research data portal

" US Department of Energy launches open data repository 04 Jul 2008

The US Department of Energy has launched the DOE Data Explorer (DDE), a tool to find scientific research data generated in the course of DOE-sponsored research in various science disciplines. The data that can be found include computer simulations, numeric data files, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia and scientific images.

The DOE Data Explorer includes a database of citations prepared by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) based on the information found at data-hosting web sites. It is intended to be particularly useful to students, the public, and to researchers who are new to a field or looking for experimental or observational data outside their normal field of expertise.

One can browse or search the database, then link to a data collection where it resides. Users will often find specialised search interfaces and software toolkits developed by the data owners. These allow the users to search deeper into the data files and help them understand, analyse and use the data within the context of their own research interests.

The publicly available data collections support DOE research results that are well documented in journal articles, conference literature and technical reports. Key DOE databases of R&D information are searchable through the Science Accelerator. The DOE Data Explorer will include enhanced search capabilities across specialised web sites as it continues to grow."

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, July 4, 2008

World Wide Science database

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.