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GCN Home > 07/05/04 issue

Science.gov’s party project

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

17 organizations bring a little something to search engine project

How do you get 17 organizations to collaborate on a single search engine? Run the project like a potluck party, according to Eleanor Frierson.

Frierson, co-chair of the Science.gov Alliance and deputy director of the Agriculture Department’s National Agricultural Library, said at a potluck party everyone brings something to contribute, and all the offerings are organized into a single presentation.

The development of Science.gov worked much the same way, said Frierson, who chairs the alliance with Tom Lahr, the Geological Survey’s chief of information management.

The Science.gov Web site is being held up as a model of interagency collaboration. Introduced in December 2002, it lets users search across scientific databases of 17 governmental organizations and 12 agencies.

The key to making it work was getting each agency involved to provide data, Frierson said. Rather than centralize the operation of the site within a small group, duties would be divvied out to each participant.

“There isn’t an 800-pound gorilla,” Frierson said. Each participant “brings together the information resources [it has], arranges them as a service and puts them out for people to use.” The idea for the search engine sprang from two workshops held in 2000 and 2001 by a special interest group called CENDI, which formerly stood for Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group. The first workshop, chaired by Alvin Trivelpiece, the former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was an attempt to map the future of scientific communications.

“We asked them to lay out a high-level vision for how the Internet could be used to disseminate scientific information better than before,” said Walter Warnick, director of CENDI as well as head of the Energy Department’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information.

The federal government funds more than $100 billion in scientific research and development each year.

Although each agency made the results of its research available on the Web in one form or another, Web surfers interested in government research in one particular field, such as food safety, would have to jump from one agency’s site to the next, gathering data.

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