Collins Unbound

Read about our Literary Cats in Collins Library! This week’s “Feline Fridays” series presents: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (Call No.: PZ7.W6461 Lit2). Kitty is the Ingalls family’s mouser. In The Witches by Roald Dahl, (Call No.: PZ7.D1515 Wi 1983), Lipshen is the grand high witch’s cat.  And in The Cat and the Moon, (Call No.: PR5904 .P6 1927) a cat is featured in one of Butler Yeats’s poems.

What is the gas mileage of your car? How much of your state is water covered? Where can you download software that will give atomic precision to your computer’s clock? These and many other questions can and have been answered by Science.gov (http://science.gov) – the Federal government’s “one stop” real-time science data website, which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Science.gov was launched in December 2002 and has broken new ground in interagency collaboration. Senior information managers representing 13 Federal agencies forged a consensus on how national science organizations could improve public access to the nation’s rich and diverse scientific research information and partnered to create the Science.gov Web portal.

“Over the past 10 years Science.gov has grown in content, capability, features and functionality,” said Tina Gheen of the Library of Congress and chair of the Science.gov Alliance (http://www.science.gov/participatingagencies.html). “As a result, we have seen significant user growth. We are very proud of this offering of sound science to the public, and we hope to continue providing this free service for years to come.”

There are now more than 200 million pages in Science.gov, and the annual page views top 34 million, a 45-fold increase from the earliest days. The founding idea was to provide a comprehensive gateway to federal science information for those who might not know exactly where to find it. The interagency effort would raise scientific and technical literacy, serve as a foundation for future discoveries, and foster greater understanding of the public’s return on investment from the government’s science and technology efforts.

“From its inception, Science.gov has been a model of collaboration, transparency and open government,” said Alliance co-chair Annie Simpson of the U.S. Geological Survey. “Back in 2002, Science.gov was touted as a wonderful ‘potluck picnic’ of science agencies pooling their efforts so citizens could find the science information they need. Well, today we are still pooling our resources because the sum is more useful to the American public than what any individual agency can do.”

The technology has changed and improved, but the goals remain the same; Science.gov strives to grow and evolve to serve users even better. In addition to recent enhancements, in June Science.gov Mobile (http://m.science.gov/scigovmobile/) made it onto two Top Ten Federal government applications lists. A Spanish version (http://ciencia.science.gov/) of the website was launched in October along with video and image search and other improvements.

For interesting facts from the Science.gov Alliance members, see: www.science.gov/coolstuff.html

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About the Science.gov Alliance: The interagency Science.gov Alliance – which governs Science.gov – includes the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, the Interior, and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency, the Library of Congress, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the National Science Foundation. These agencies represent 97 percent of the federal R&D budget.

The Science.gov website is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), within the Office of Science.

Science.gov, your gateway to U.S. federal science, is supported by CENDI (http://www.cendi.gov), an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information managers.

In summary, here are the links with the above information and related topics:

Press Release English

Press Release Spanish

Then and Now

Cool Things

Gwynne Brown, Assistant Professor of Music History and Music Theory at the University of Puget Sound enjoyed library fame as guest contributor to the MARL blog at Emory University. Gwynne spent a month with them this summer delving into the papers of composer William Levi Dawson. Periodically, this MARBL blog features updates and insights from visiting researchers working within MARBL’s collections. Read her amazing article.

Read about our Literary Cats in Collins Library! This week’s “Feline Fridays” series presents: Space-time For Springers by Fritz Leiber (Call No.: PS3523.E4583 B4), where in this collection of short stories, Gummitch is a superkitten. In The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, (Call No.: PZ10.3.T3734 Cr), Harry Cat is a character in this appealing and whimsical book and its sequels.  And in I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki, (Call No.: PL816.A8 W313 2002) read about the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him in Japan.

In addition to supporting the YWCA Women’s Shelter by donating toys during the holidays, last year the library adopted a creature to be painted on their shelter mural: “Collins” the dragonfly, named after our beloved campus cat.