New features spice up Science.Gov and Vivisimo’s Clusty

The Energy Department is trying to make it easier to find scientific documents on the multiagency Science.Gov site.The site, run by Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information, has also added some user-friendly enhancements to its .Science.Gov now lets users request weekly e-mail alerts that summarize new papers and materials posted to government sites that provide content to the DOE site. Science.Gov indexes scientific material from 30 databases and over 1,700 science Web sites.Energy also announced that it has joined an academic linking service, called , run by a nonprofit industry collation called the Publishers International Linking Association.CrossRef assigns permanent digital object identifiers (DOIs) to scientific reports, allowing them to be located even if their Web addresses change.Energy will place DOIs on the 90,000 documents stored in its of Energy scientific reports.The Interagency Committee on Government Information’s Categorization of Government Information Working Group is working on a standard for DOIs that can be used across government [see ].Meanwhile, search software vendor Vivisimo Inc. has added to its aggregated search site, Clusty, a section exclusively devoted to government resources.The is based on the Pittsburgh company’s basic search aggregation technology. The software organizes the results of a user’s search into thematic folders, allowing for easier perusal of the material.Clusty searches across a number of commercial search engines such as Microsoft MSN, as well as a customized list of resources defined by the user.Under the new tab on Clusty, users can do a search that will span multiple federal and government-related Web resources, such as FirstGov, the Defense Department’s DefenseLink and the government section of MSN.The site also offers a customizable summary of government news stories and the ability to search popular government documents, such as the president’s fiscal 2006 budget proposal.“Our idea is to provide a one-stop resource for people who want to stay abreast of government- or politics-related information,” said Saman Haqqi, director of marketing for the company.