SLA Government Information Division

OSTI Launches a Facebook Page

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) now has a presence on Facebook, as announced on their blog. The OSTI Facebook Page includes links to OSTI databases, widgets for OSTI databases, a feed from OSTIblog, staff photos, and videos about the national labs.

Other Facebook Pages from the feds include USA.gov and Veterans Health Administration. You do not need to have a Facebook account to view these pages. (For more on government Facebook Pages, see "The Government Online: Government Sociability," Searcher Magazine, November/December 2008.)

While you are checking out OSTIblog, take a look at the 15 December 2008 post, We need a National Library of Energy to rapidly deploy transformative energy innovations.

E-Science Workshop 2008

NFAIS and CENDI--two professional organizations concerned with information management--are joining forces to sponsor Making the Web Work for Science: The Impact of e-Science and the Cyberinfrastructure in Washington, DC on 8 December 2008. The program includes such sessions as "Making the Web Work for Science: What Scientists Really Need!" and "Making the Web Work for Science: What the Future Holds".  FLICC is hosting the one-day workshop at the Library of Congress. Online registration is available.

Info Bridge Adds Older DOE Tech Reports

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has obtained 15,000 newly digitized copies of its technical reports that had previously been available only on paper or microfiche. The reports have been added to the DOE Information Bridge web database. DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) reports that this addition has increased the holdings of Information Bridge by 9 percent, bringing the total to about 190,000 reports. DOE obtained the digitized version through its membership in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has digitized these and other member nations' reports for its International Nuclear Information System (INIS).

To learn more, see:

• OSTI News Announcement, 30 September
• OSTI Blog post, More Energy Department research goes online due to OSTI, IAEA collaboration

New Global Science Gateway

From the June 22nd press release:

WorldWideScience.org opens public access to more than 200 million pages of international research information...

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library, along with eight other participating countries, today opened an online global gateway to science information from 15 national portals.  The gateway, WorldWideScience.org, gives citizens, researchers and anyone interested in science the capability to search science portals not easily accessible through popular search technology such as that deployed by Google, Yahoo! and many other commercial search engines.

The portal provides for a federated search of Science.gov (United States), UK PubMed Central (United Kingdom) and resources from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, and Netherlands.

NIH PubMed Central Adds Millionth Article

From the press release:

PubMed Central (PMC), NLM's free digital archive of full-text journal articles, reached the one million-article mark the week of June 18. The millionth article reportedly came from the American Journal of Pathology. Now in its seventh year, PMC is enhanced each week with articles from over 350 important life sciences journals whose publishers have agreed to deposit current issues. All of the content submitted to PMC is converted to a normalized electronic format for long-term storage and display on the web.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) offers a Flash demo of PubMed Central. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Extramural Research provides the NIH "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research" via PubMed Central.