60,000 DOE Scientific and Technical Reports Online
For the first time ever, each of 60,000 full-text scientific and technical reports sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) is directly accessible on the Internet using a unique URL. These reports reside on the DOE Information Bridge at http://www.osti.gov/bridge which provides to the public at no charge the capability to search every word of all the reports. A Persistent URL (PURL) allows educators, students, scientists, and engineers to directly access individual documents and to easily direct others to them. The collection of over 5 million full-text pages is DOE's report literature output since January 1995. Scientists and researchers are encouraged to share these reports with colleagues and others. This ever-increasing report collection is the product of an extensive collaboration among DOE Programs, Operations Offices, Laboratories, and other DOE contractors. It is made available to the public through a partnership between the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information and the Government Printing Office. For more information, please contact Kathy Chambers, Product Manager, at (865) 576-0487 or via e-mail at [log in to unmask].

E-Government Initiative for DOE Technical Reports
The Department of Energy (DOE) has established a new performance goal for Operations Offices and Laboratories to complete the transition to a fully-electronic process for submitting, retaining, and making the Department’s scientific and technical information (STI) readily available to its broad constituency of users. In a memorandum signed by program officials, a call was issued to all offices and laboratories to provide all full-text STI reports and accompanying announcement data to the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in electronic formats by January 1, 2001. Many offices and labs in DOE were already providing reports and data electronically. OSTI and the Department’s STI community initiated this massive effort in 1998 by reinventing information processing, management, and delivery systems and procedures to allow for the transition. The transition has allowed OSTI to make full-text reports available and searchable, with a minimal processing effort, through a set of tools that create an electronic environment throughout the information life cycle. OSTI makes the publicly releasable full-text STI reports searchable on the DOE Information Bridge, accessible by the public at http://www.osti.gov/bridge.  As a result, DOE continues to lead all other Federal agencies in the electronic receipt, processing and delivery of full-text STI generated by scientists, engineers, and researchers. For more information about this initiative, please contact Sharon Jordan at (865) 576-1194 or via e-mail at [log in to unmask].

Physical Sciences Information Infrastructure
For more than 50 years, studies have called for a comprehensive resource for finding, understanding, and using information about our physical world. Realizing that the Internet and distributed information technologies now provide the means to fulfill this vision, the Department of Energy sponsored a workshop May 30-31, 2000, at the National Academy of Sciences, to explore the concept of a future Physical Sciences Information Infrastructure (PSII). Workshop panelists agreed "The time is now; the need is now." The Workshop report http://www.osti.gov/physicalsciences endorses PSII as an integrated network of dispersed resources, a point of convergence for tools and technologies, and an openly available source of information in sciences that explore the nature and properties of energy and nonliving matter. The Report also emphasizes the need for a collaborative effort involving science agencies, academia, professional societies, and the private sector. The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), with over 50 years experience and leadership in the collection and sharing of worldwide scientific and technical information, has laid the foundation for the PSII with innovative information products and services. Currently, OSTI is actively pursuing the collaborative development of an implementation strategy for PSII through partnerships and consortia agreements. Partnership arrangements, sources of content, tools/technologies, and numerous other planning activities for the PSII are currently being explored as support for this initiative continues to grow. For more information, contact RL Scott at [log in to unmask] or (865) 576-1193.

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