Welcome. This is our first meeting together since we all developed our STIP Strategic Plan last year. The intervening months have been highly productive. The theme of our strategic plan is "A Complex-Wide Collaboration." I am very happy to announce here today that collaboration has become a reality. Collaboration is working, and working well. I applaud your success. Collaboration is very important because the alternative Command and Control is less productive for meeting our customers needs and, I think, less satisfying for us participants. I hope you agree. We are purposefully trying to minimize Command and Control. Paraphrasing Lincoln, together, we have embarked on a grand experiment which will answer the question: can a collaborative plan OF the STI community and BY the STI community long survive? While the collaboration so far is going fine, the experiment is still in its infancy. Another test of our collaboration is upon us. There is an old saying in government: there are no problems, only CHALLENGES and OPPORTUNITIES. The "challenge" we face is becoming web-based and decentralized--a challenge that this group recognized four years ago when you added the following item to DOE Order 1430.1D: f. "A central Departmental STI coordinating function shall be maintained with Program implementation becoming more decentralized as technologies, standards, and procedures permit." We said we would DECENTRALIZE when technologies permit. Well, technologies permit now. At this meeting, we will urge that standards and procedures be adopted, and adopted soon. We will make these recommendations because we think our STI system will work better. We also think these changes will make the jobs of us all easier once we get through the process of changing. While we are going to assert our preferences, we will disdain Command and Control edicts to the maximum extent possible. Not only do edicts work poorly, they do not accommodate the unique contraints each of us face. We hope that each organization does the best it can to adopt the preferences expressed here at this meeting, but if resources or other constraints preclude full accommodation, then we will simply do the best we can. The "opportunity" I'm speaking of is to fill old needs in better ways. We need to make broader use of the Department's STI. We must not miss this opportunity, for our traditional products and services are becoming more and more obsolete. Traditional library services and paper reports are being replaced by user-freindly searchable electronic infromation sources. Even paper journals are being replaced by electronic versions. While some of our old services are going away, STI is becoming more important to the success of DOE. The Department of Energy is very much in the information business. Information is the principal product of the Department's R&D programs, and R&D is the bulk of what DOE does now. Since we no longer make weapons, we no longer have a regulatory program, and we no longer conduct nuclear energy development programs, today, STI is DOE's main product. If STI is the Department's primary product, what are the implications for us in the STI community? The answer is, DOE and its contractor community need DOE information to be used, visible, and praised. Public support is essential for DOE but, today, the public has very little appreciation of the output of DOE R&D. Here is a prime example. I recently read an editorial in a Washington newspaper calling for the elimination of DOE; not once did the critic even mention DOE's R&D program. The conclusion is inescapable that the public simply does not know that DOE is an R&D agency or that STI is our primary product. Dr. Krebs and the Secretary have already expressed their interest in making STI more useful and visible. The DOE Strategic Plan under the Science and Technology goal not only recognizes this collaborative effort of ours, but it specifically calls for increased public access to the Department's STI. It also calls for access to electronic journals at the desk top. That is a pretty clear sign of support for what we do. Those of us gathered here today have a key responsibility to help demonstrate the usefulness of DOE. Information Age technology offers us the chance to succeed. Just as the Industrial Revolution extended the reach of human muscle, the Information Age is extending the reach of human intellect. Through our collaborative efforts we in this room can make our mark in the Informtion Age and make STI better available to our customers. We can make STI available quicker, cheaper, more completely, and more conveniently. Let me give you a concrete example from the past year. On September 5 we unveiled the Information Bridge which is a collection of 24,000 of your full-text technical reports. The Information Bridge is essentially the sum total of DOE output since January 1996. OSTI did not generate these reports; each one was sent to OSTI by you. What's especially exciting is that we have made a deal with GPO to make the Information Bridge available to the public; everybody that has internet accessibility will be able to use the Information Bridge in April 1998. Because of the partnership with GPO, we will be able to make some changes to the Information Bridge to address some of your concerns for ease of use, such as eliminating passwords. Consider for a moment what the GPO agreement means for researchers. Their world is changing, too. While researchers have long had to produce their reports, many of them, especially on the basic research side of DOE, did not consider their reports as a primary mechanism for getting their information out. They looked upon DOE reports as an unwelcome burden. However, beginning in April 1998, because of the Information Bridge, researchers' reports will be instantaneously accessible and searchable in 10-20 million households and offices all across the country and at thousands of public libraries--to everyone who has Internet access. I think that full-text availability in a quick, convenient, no-cost, and searchable format like the Information Bridge will cause a change in attitude among researchers about their reports, as the Information Bridge becomes widely known. While we all should be proud of the Information Bridge, it would be an even better product if we did business a little differently. Now, each report on the Information Bridge begins life as an electronic text file, and ends up as another electronic file, only in an image format. In between, many of the reports are transmitted to OSTI in paper format. It would make a lot more sense if the reports remained as electronic text files from cradle to archive. We will talk throughout this meeting about how we can jointly make this vision a reality. We already have top level endorsement. When Martha Krebs presented our Strategic Plan to lab directors and ops office managers on September 17, she wrote that the Plan supports "transitioning STI access and delivery into a distributed, electronic environment." As we are making considerable progress to that end, I will soon ask senior leaders of DOE to reaffirm their support for the actions and directions we are taking together. Another accomplishment in 1997 was a pilot for electronic journals now available at HQ. Through STIP Work Group 2 we are trying to catch up with what has already been accomplished at several labs. We have all the journals of the American Physical Society online and available to everybody at headquarters. This is especially important because severe budget cuts to the headquarters libraries have eliminated paper journals from the shelves. Dr. Jeff Mandula, a program manager in ER, has written to me applauding our making APS journals available to DOE HQ. He feels that most scientists will switch over to this electronic version as their primary source for journal literature. He wrote that our initiative could not have come at a more opportune time. We've now added electronic access to the journals of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Our next steps are two-fold: 1) to increase the journal titles that we can make available, and 2) to work in collaboration with you to make them accessible across the complex, not just at Headquarters. Another accomplishment in 1997 was unveiling Energy Files, a web-based energy virtual library. EnergyFiles is being developed under the auspices of STIP Work Group 1. It will evolve into the primary umbrella under which STI and scientific tools and technologies are made available at the desk top. EnergyFiles currently consists of 29 core collections. Some of the key Departmental resources available through EnergyFiles include: -System of INEEL. The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Document
Information Energy Files offers each of us the opportunity to make our site specific information available on a wider scale. It can only work by collaboration. Here is an example to illustrate why. A project now underway is called Federated Collections. It will make it possible for a single user inquiry to search and retrieve information from a number of sites in the DOE complex. The pilot of Federated Collections is up and running. The pilot was possible only by the active collaboration of LANL, Bechtel Hanford, Sandia, and OSTI. Joint effort is required for the distributed STI environment. EnergyFiles is the foundation for a future National Library of Energy Science and Technology. This is a long term dream that I am promoting at every opportunity. However, time does not permit me to discuss it fully, now, but I will be happy to talk about it at length through the course of this meeting. The mere existance of a National Library announces to the world that the parent agency does R&D of which it is proud. Our Plan last June called for re-chartering a group called the Scientific and Technical Information Coordination Group (STICG), which is a group of leaders from the R&D program offices in DOE HQ who serve as an advisory body for our activities. The Group has approved its new charter and the second meeting will be held this Thursday with the STIP Goal Team Leaders reporting progress of their Teams. STICG is our conduit to the appointees who administer the Department's R&D programs. STICG will take any issues requiring an agency-wide decision to the R&D Council. To summarize, the challenges we are experiencing and those to come mean that our relative roles must change. To meet the challenges we must seize the opportunities of the Information Age. This meeting and the on-going work of the STIP Goal Teams are critical to our success. I look forward to building on what we have already accomplished and on leaving here with a clear understanding of our respective roles in the new decentralized electronic environment. Let me take a moment to summarize our specific objectives for this meeting over the next 2 days: First, we have several informational items on which we would like to get your input. Second, we will summarize the recently completed STIP Assessment including sharing responses from the sites. Third, the four Work Group leaders will provide a status report of the Groups' activities to give you an opportunity to ask questions and decide which group(s) you like to participate in on future activities. Fourth, Karen Spence will present for your consideration an electronic STI concept paper as a jumping-off point for more detailed discussions and decisions. Fifth, we will go over the changes which we have identified for the Order/Guide and seek your buy-in or recommended changes. We will get your recommendations later about whether to break out into working groups or stay together to deal with the topics. And finally, we will give the STIP Goal Teams an opportunity to meet and discuss issues and future activities. We very much appreciate your attendance and look forward to an open and productive meeting. Thank you.
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