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

2. 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”).

3. 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

4. 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

6. 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

7. 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 2002www.science.gov 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

8. 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?

9. Continuing Challenges Collaboration with other science portals: Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) www.agnic.org www.agnic.org CISTI - cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cisti_e.htmlcisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cisti_e.html DEFF – www.deff.dkwww.deff.dk JST (Japan) www.jst.go.jp/EN/www.jst.go.jp/EN/ Korea (under development) RDN - http://www.rdn.ac.ukhttp://www.rdn.ac.uk Science.gov (Australia) - www.science.gov.auwww.science.gov.au Science (Canada) - www.science.gc.cawww.science.gc.ca Science.gouv (France) - www.science.gouv.frwww.science.gouv.fr Vascoda - www.vascoda.dewww.vascoda.de

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