Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

August 2007

Title: Information Bridge
Publisher: Department of Energy
URL: http://www.osti.gov/bridge/
Cost: free
Tested: 10-22 August, 2007

The Context

There are several energy science- and technology-related sites, both subscription-based and open access. In the latter category, the Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWeb) indexing and abstracting database of the International Energy Agency is by far the largest with about four million records. It is a genuinely international database with significant record contributions from many countries. It requires registration, and the password must be renewed every six months (but it certainly is worth the trouble). Another large database is EnergySearch of EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute. One of the reasons for its large size is that it covers Web sites of various relevance and clout and includes many entries from product catalogs.

On the other end of the spectrum is the research-oriented Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) site at Stanford University with a very focused collection of open access full-text publications from working papers to journal articles and conference papers — especially on energy policy issues. In between, there are well above 100 high-quality digital reference sources (ranging from energy-related glossaries to scientific books) about all aspects and types of energy. Considering the variety of sources and the volume of research related to energy, it is surprising that we are still so much at the mercy of the countries with seemingly endless oil reserves.

For many information professionals I am supposed to be a fierce critic of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the Department of Energy. This is not so. It is true that I have been sanguinely opposing the financial support by Congress of its ill-conceived and very ill-implemented PubScience project. It is true that I strongly disagreed with the hundreds of librarians who signed the letter to Congress to maintain the roughly $2 million-a-year support of PubScience, and I used all my outlets to illustrate the appalling traits of the project, which finally got the coup de grace, and nothing was retained from it.

But it is also true that several years ago, the Energy Citations Database of OSTI was one of my picks in my column in ONLINE magazine and I wrote a positive, in-depth review about it in this very column along with a scathing review of PubScience in the very same installment in September 2002. The records of Information Bridge also are searchable in and linked from the Energy Citations Database. It still deserves its own review, because although it is searched through various portals, Information Bridge is like a bag of fine, whole cashews versus a bag of mixed nuts (in which you find mostly peanuts with only a few cashews).

The Content

Information Bridge has 152,254 records as of mid-August, 2007. This does not seem to be that much when the Scitation service of AIP alone finds nearly 331,000 records out of its closely 1.5-million-item database for the word “energy” anywhere in the records.

On the other hand, the size of Information Bridge is impressively large for open access full-text documents related to energy science and technology. It finds the word “energy” in more than 112,000 records when searching the entire record — which in this case means the full text of the documents. More importantly for many users, it also delivers the full text free.

The topics covered range from atomic energy to fossil fuels, from renewable energy to energy storage, conversion and use, and anything in between as long as they relate to energy.

The database covers from the mid-1940s, not just to the mid-1990s as the blurb of the Department of Energy claims. The pre-1995 part of the collection has more than 46,000 documents, which is significant and represents almost a third of Information Bridge.

Some of the legacy documents may not be of interest anymore, but there are many which are still worth reading. As an extreme example, you don’t need to be a physicist to become interested when browsing the pre-1995 segment, and you run into a report titled The Future of Nuclear Energy. It adds much to the appeal that it is from Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi from 1946. The abstract is relevant, but the real pleasure is that you are only a click away from reading his relatively short report (more like an essay) on the topic.

It made it more discouraging that I read his sober-minded paper about the hopes of the peaceful use of nuclear energy just as I heard the breaking news in the background, that Iran could have atomic energy not in the middle of the next decade but by the end of this year.

Technical reports make up almost 70% of the collection, followed by 57,000+ conference papers. There are no journal articles authored by DOE employees and contractors, but there are more than 1,600 dissertations and thesis, 950 books, more than 1,000 patents and patent applications, and 50 software manuals. This well complements the journal-centric collections of most of the digital archives of the largest commercial publishers and learned societies.

The Software

This is an excellent software from Deep Web Tecnologies, which finally seems to have been discovered by government agencies beyond the DOE — although not always bringing the most out of the software. Information Bridge deserves credit for the very good use of the software, which starts with an appealing search template. It offers the searching of every data element one may need. If the search is done by multiple data elements, they can be given different weight factors by the user — a rarity in search engines.

It is welcome that the author index and the subject index can be browsed. Without a browsable author index, a direct search may miss several documents by an author whose name appears with a variety of slightly different punctuations and spacing. Some of these are hardly distinguishable for the naked eye, but are enough for the search program to miss. For example, a couple of Enrico Fermi’s papers because of the slight differences in the spelling of his name.

The subject look-up is also useful, although it is not always obvious under which categories and subcategories one would find, say, wind energy. It would help if there were a look-up query cell to type in the term or the beginning of the term, and then the software would open the thesaurus at the appropriate subcategory showing the context of the broader, narrower and related terms. Both look-up options (and users) would much benefit if the posting information would be displayed, showing the number of items that have the given author name, and subject term, respectively.

The results may be sorted by relevance, publication date, author, document type, title, research organizations, sponsoring organization and even by entry dates — in either ascending and descending order. This is an unusually rich set of options when even many subscription-based services offer merely two options: sorting by relevance rank or reverse chronological order.

It is a convenient feature for very lengthy documents that the document may be displayed either page by page, or in their entirety.

Information Bridge is one of the best digitization efforts of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information of the Department of Energy. It represents the grey literature side of the scientific publication output, and very well complements the journal-focused digital collections of commercial publishers and learned societies. It also has one of the best implementations of the ExploreIt software.