07
Apr
2008
Today, all of OSTI's information products are on the web. This is in sharp contrast to the situation as recently as the mid-1990s, when OSTI had no products on the web.
First becoming popular in 1994, the web quickly emerged as a transformational technology, and its potential for reshaping OSTI was apparent. Recognizing the opportunity to advance the OSTI mission, OSTI set out to capitalize on it as quickly as resources would allow by producing web applications to disseminate all manner of scientific and technical information (STI). A steady progression of new OSTI products addressed the various forms of STI: technical reports, e-prints, conference proceedings, accomplishments, patents, and project descriptions . To make it easy for users who want to search through all these products at once, we introduced the DOE Science Accelerator, which is powered by our special web architecture called federated search. Reaching out beyond DOE, we initiated a collaboration with other agencies to allow users to search their R&D results along with DOE's; thus emerged Science.gov. Most recently, we took collaboration world wide by federating the best information sources from governments around the world, WorldWideScience which makes searchable about the same quantity of science as does Google.
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