Science.gov: Providing Unified and Simplified Access to U.S. Government Science

InformationPresented by

Eleanor Frierson, Deputy Director

National Agricultural Library and Co-chair,

Science.gov Alliance

Symposium: Global Discovery on the Internet: A Grand Challenge

AAAS Annual Meeting 2006

Why Science.gov?

There is a need to find U.S. government scientific and technical information quickly and easily, but

information is dispersed across thousands of Web sites (“Surface Web”) and databases (“Deep Web”).

Science.gov Creation Challenges

• Broad scope of Federal science and technology research and development missions

• Wide-ranging interests of potential audiences• Information organization (taxonomy) issues given

the broad scope and audiences• Blending information resources from different

agencies into cohesive functionality and page design

• Politics, human resources, funding, sustainability

What is Science.gov?

• “FirstGov for Science”• A Web portal that provides unified and

simplified access to selected U.S. government Web sites and databases that contain scientific and technical information

• A voluntary large scale collaboration among U.S. government agencies

What Does www.science.gov Do?

• Searches selected Web sites (“Surface Web”) and Databases (“Deep Web”) from one search box, using simple to fairly advanced searching techniques

• Combines results from all sources searched, ranks and displays them by relevance

• Sends “alerts” for topics of interest every Monday or as new information is added

How Has Science.gov Evolved?

• Science.gov Alliance formed in 2001 - 14 scientific and technical information organizations from 10 major science agencies

• V. 1.0 of www.science.gov launched in December 2002

• V. 2.0 launched in May 2004• “Alerts” service launched in February 2005• V. 3.0 launched in December 2005• Science.gov Alliance now includes 17 organizations

from 12 agencies

Continuing Challenges

• More usage – science.gov usage is growing, especially as more “alerts” are established, but it has plenty of room for growth

• More complete results display –searches are now comprehensive but the extent of results displayed is a function of the size of result sets supplied from the individual organizations. Ideally, both searching and result display would be comprehensive and uniform

• Where to go after v. 4.0?

Continuing Challenges

Collaboration with other science portals:

• Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) www.agnic.org• CISTI - cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cisti_e.html• DEFF – www.deff.dk• JST (Japan) www.jst.go.jp/EN/• Korea (under development) • RDN - http://www.rdn.ac.uk • Science.gov (Australia) - www.science.gov.au• Science (Canada) - www.science.gc.ca• Science.gouv (France) - www.science.gouv.fr• Vascoda - www.vascoda.de

What’s Next for Science.gov?

• Version 4.0, under development, will add searching of decentralized full text repositories to the existing searching of Web sites and databases

• Science.gov Alliance members will continue to add new content

• www.science.gov will be evaluated and modified to meet customer needs

• The Science.gov Alliance will begin thinking about the future of www.science.gov beyond version 4.0