OSTI.gov- federated science search

Happy Friday! Today's resource is a redesigned information portal from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) at the Department of Energy (DOE). The OSTI website recently underwent a redesign and now sports features such as tagging options for pages on the site and a Science Showcase discovery area, as well as a Web 2.0 tools including an RSS feed, search widgets, blog and bookmarking tools. Hat tip once again to Danny Luce for informing me about the site redesign.

What's really exciting about the OSTI site, however, is the powerful federated search capabilities. OSTI has partnered with Deep Web Technologies to provide federated search capabilities across multiple databases containing scientific information. This eliminates the need to search each database by hand, and also the need to know which databases contain the information you are looking for- a single query searches all sources of federal science information at once. OSTI provides three federated search engines on its site: the Science Accelerator, which searches DOE publications (including some archival materials), the US scientific information search engine at Science.gov, and a new Global Science search engine that searches global scientific repositories for reports and data.

OSTI also makes DOE datasets available for discovery by researchers with the DOE DataExplorer.

OSTI records are also searchable via the Open Archives Initiative union catalog OAIster. The Library Tools allow librarians to download both MARC and OAI records into their own catalogs.

I think the new website is a valuable addition to the library community, and really furthers OSTI's goal to accelerate the discovery of scientific information by researchers and the general public. Great work!

While exploring OSTI's new site, I clicked through to Deep Web Technology's site and saw some additional federated search products that are also very helpful. Many are already familiar with Scitopia, a deep web federated search engine that searches government science data, patents and the papers of over 15 societies that collectively provide over 150 years of science and technology scholarship. ScienceResearch is another deep web science search engine. Biznar, a global business search engine, and Mednar, a medical search engine, were also developed by Deep Web Technologies. Free browser plugins for each of these sites allow you to search these engines directly from your own website.