ScienceCinema, OSTI's new multimedia search tool, was launched yesterday as part of a one-day workshop, “Multimedia and Visualization Innovations for Science,” jointly hosted by Microsoft and the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), held in Redmond, Washington. At the workshop, Lorrie Johnson, OSTI's ScienceCinema product manager, and Behrooz Chitsaz of Microsoft Research, held a session on ScienceCinema and the role of mulitmedia in the current science discovery environment. They correctly pointed out that although internet search tools are adequate for searching web pages and textual documents, the same is not true for multimedia content. So in order to provide better access to scientific and technical multimedia, OSTI has partnered with Microsoft Research to leverage speech recognition technology to enable searching across large volumes of spoken Department of Energy content, i.e., ScienceCinema. We hope you will try ScienceCinema and let us know what you think. You can read more about the technology at the OSTI press release and at the Energy Blog.

Brian Hitson, Associate Director

Administration and Information Services
Office of Scientific and Technical Information