The limiting factor for knowledge diffusion is people’s time
Jeff Given is the IT Operations Manager for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This post is a pre-cursor to the iFOCOS Search Working Group meeting on April 24th, 2007.
About OSTI – OSTI’s mission is to collect and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Several key technologies support our efforts to disseminate DOE STI, including search and retrieval for our internal collection and federated search for collections of interest to the DOE, but not physically housed at OSTI. OSTI’s main public STI collection consists of approximately 2.3 million bibliographic citations and 150,000 electronically available full text reports. OSTI’s key search and retrieval products include Information Bridge (electronic full text), Energy Citations Database (bibliographic citations), ePrint Network (draft journal articles and scholarly papers), and Science.gov (federated search of authoritative science information provided by the US government).
Relevance, for OSTI and most likely many other similar agencies, provides a constant challenge. In order to get government-funded science information into the hands of researchers and interested public, we have placed major significance on including the major enterprise search engines as part of our dissemination strategy. The inefficient crawls of the past have been replaced by new methodologies, supported largely by the recently adopted Site Map Protocol.
It is significant to note that approximately half of our web traffic to publicly available STI is derived from referrals from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. We expect to see this increase significantly in the next 12 months, and is a good indicator that the enterprise search engines such as Google are the standard onramp to the information superhighway (See: Search, while dominant, is not very good).
Even though we have implemented several technologies to assist the user in finding material of high relevance quickly, we still feel there is a significant amount of work to be done in this area.
OSTI’s mission to collect and disseminate DOE STI underlies our fundamental vision to advance science. Accomplishing this involves many facets, however ultimately it boils down to gathering the right resources and putting the most relevant results in front of the right people, and to do so in a constantly changing landscape. The real limiting factor for knowledge diffusion is people’s time. The focus of all efforts to improve web search should be to get the most relevant content to the user in the shortest possible time with the least amount of user effort.
So, what constitutes a better search?
