Since 1995, the Technical Information Officers (TIOs) and the STI Managers have met on the third Tuesday of each month via meet-me calls. The meet-me calls were established to meet a need for interactive communication among OSTI and the TIOs and STI Managers during the months between the semi-annual STIP meetings. Although meet-me calls can be limiting in terms of an in-depth discussion, they do allow for open communication, the sharing of new ideas and information issues, and in some cases as a forum for making STI-related policy decisions. The semi-annual STIP Meetings which include the TIOs and the STI Managers are a more effective forum for in-depth discussions related to STI policy. Historically these meetings have alternated between the west coast in the fall and the east coast in the spring; however, on occasion a meeting is held in the Washington, D.C. area to encourage more Headquarters Program participation. The east coast meeting is usually held in conjunction with the annual spring InForum Meeting hosted by OSTI in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There are four STIP goal teams and a STIP Integration Team. Each goal team has a leader and these leaders makeup the membership of the STIP Integration Team. The goal team leaders are representatives from OSTI and DOE contractor organizations. Each of the four goal teams have very specific objectives and measures described in the STIP Strategic Plan. The accomplishments and activities of the goal teams are listed below. Goal One is responsible for focusing on ways to provide DOE customers with convenient, timely and appropriate access to STI in a form they can use to accomplish their mission. Goal One's accomplishments and activities include: - Metadata (core set of announcement record data elements) was developed for DOE STI, along with the web form to collect the data on-line. - Reached agreement on subject category scheme for DOE STI, adopting a set of 38 primary subject areas. - Participating in machine-aided indexing (MAI) testing and implementation as new software is developed. - Identifying and incorporating legacy collections into electronically retrievable collection. - Developing training modules to provide STI points of contact and others information on the STI program roles, responsibilities, requirements, and activities. Goal Two's main focus is to establish collaborative relationships to support the Department's Scientific and Technical Information Program by pursuing the collective purchasing power of the DOE community with publishers of scholarly journals. Goal Two's accomplishments and activities include: - The development and distribution of a demographic survey regarding interest in consortium arrangements for electronic journals. - A consortium agreement with "Science" magazine. - A consortia pricing arrangement for 14 DOE contractor sites; many smaller sites were able to subscribe at a greatly reduced cost. - Laying groundwork for future cooperation by contacting more than a dozen publishers. - Setting up access to "Science's Next Wave," (which is being funded by SC-1 and DP-1) with OSTI serving as subscription administrator. May have access for all DOE and DOE Contractors to this desktop resource. - Working with other publishers such as Elsevier; discussions are underway with Elsevier and Los Alamos to see how LANL's expertise can be leveraged across the board.- Access to journals of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) was coordinated, available to Headquarters users at no charge, and working to secure similar types of agreements; includes the HQ Energy Library. Goal Three is tasked with
promoting the use of best business practices to ensure effective
life-cycle management of STI. Goal Three's accomplishments and - Investigated relation between R&D cycle and STI (recommended tracking projects and deliverables by a unique number, i.e., FWP # - similar to discussion paper topic). - The revision and August 1998 issuance of the STI Order and Guide. - An electronic transition checklist was developed for sites - Establishing a "best practices" web forum for sites to share their successful practices/innovations for managing information at each step in its life cycle (e.g., creation, publication, dissemination, archive, retrieve). - Developing revised practices for software management (to produce a new Part III of the Guide with more decentralized management of STI software similar to other STI products). And Goal Four is responsible for establishing customer-driven STIP products and services. Goal Four's accomplishments and activities include: - The development of a standard list of electronic document formats (SGML, HTML, Word, etc.) and how these would be transmitted, output, and archived. - The review and endorsement of technologies utilized for the Federated Collections Pilot to access the full spectrum of STI via distributed queries- such as with E-Link. Experience with the Pilot also confirmed the need to use a centralized metadata collection.- The review of electronic exchange instructions for full-text. - Compiling user feedback across sites with STI on the web to identify next steps. - Exploring search ability of science and math characters. ADDITIONAL COMMUNICATION CHANNELS Another way information is communicated
to the STIP Community is through the STIP Home Page. The STIP Home Page
was designed to announce the STIP community's activities and
accomplishments. The URL is: http://www.osti.gov/stip/.
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