STIP Managers Teleconference

September 27, 2006

12:00-1:00 pm ET

Attendees: Isom Harrison (LLNL), Pam Novak (PNNL), Nancy Doran (PNNL), Cathy Wright (NETL-Albany), Dennis Gound (ORNL Site Office), Mary Coglianese (ANL), Catherine Crawley (ORISE), Kim Kindrew (JLAB), Jessica Shafer-Gant (SNL), Lilas Soukup (NETL-Pittsburgh), Roselle Drahushak-Crow (GO), Donna Lawson (Y-12), Debbie Beckett (SRS), Jill Jacoby (NSTec), Dale Claflin (INL), Michelle Johnson (INL-CWI), Daphne Evans (OSTI-IIA), Patty Simmons (OSTI), Judy Gilmore (OSTI), Jannean Elliott (OSTI), Sharon Jordan (OSTI), Gary Robinson (OSTI), Kim Buckner (OSTI-ESTSC), and Kathy Waldrop (OSTI)

Geothermal Project Update (Patty Simmons) - A special “Thank You” is provided to the labs that supported the collection of geothermal documents at OSTI. Many of you took time out from your busy schedules to support this project, and it is greatly appreciated both by OSTI and the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Geothermal Technologies Program. Please visit the new Geothermal Technologies Subject Portal at http://www.osti.gov/geothermal/ and check out your sites submissions. While everything you did is greatly appreciated, the effort continues. Please send any additional documents that you identify to OSTI for this very important collection.

Hidden Document Status (Kathy Waldrop) – Don’t forget that the new version of E-Link allows you to search for your site’s hidden document list. Please contact me if you have questions about how to search for your hidden documents. You also have the option to hide and unhide documents within E-Link. BNL, ORNL, and SRS have unhidden their remaining hidden documents since the 2006 STIP Meeting. Overall, approximately 8000 documents were unhidden this year.

Special Characters Update (Jannean Elliott) - Special Characters/Character Encoding Project: Jannean Elliott briefly reviewed the situation presented at the 2006 STIP meeting in Chicago. She reported that OSTI continued to update all systems to UTF-8 character encoding. Approximately 30 percent of the 32 identified systems are now done. Meanwhile, OSTI’s Special Characters Technical Team has put in place some safeguards to prevent new problems and has identified the records already in-house that potentially have “garbage” characters in them as a result of the change from one character encoding to another. Approximately 2000 of these records have now been individually reviewed, with another 5000 to go. The good news is that the rate of real problems in this collection is running much lower than expected: approximately 15 percent so far.

The next step after all these in-house records are reviewed will be correcting them, and then OSTI and the STIP community as whole will need to turn its attention to determining what special characters will be handled in the future and how those characters will be retrieved.

Gary Robinson, interning with OSTI from the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Library and Information Science, attended the teleconference because he is assisting with the Special Character Project.

STIP Site Assistance Visits (Kathy Waldrop) – Judy and I spent the latter part of August and early part of September visiting three sites for STIP site assistance visits. We spent a couple of days at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) the only DOE GOGO laboratory. We visited both LANL and YMP the week of September 10. All three site visits were very beneficial to OSTI and according to the sites, to them as well.

Some information to share about each of them…

Regarding NETL- Since NETL has 5 sites located in Pittsburgh, PA; Morgantown, WV; Albany, OR; Fairbanks, AK; and Tulsa, Oklahoma; they are considering having two TIOs. One to oversee their internal financial assistance STI program and other to oversee the lab generated STI.

Miriam Blake agreed to serve as the acting STI Manager for LANL while LANL reviews their STI Program. Bonna Savarise of YMP replaced Chris Forbes as STI Manager. Chris left YMP a couple of months ago.

We learned that each site is working on various STI activities that we were unaware of before our visit, so it was good to have an in-depth look and discussions about these activities.

508 Compliance (Judy Gilmore) - In recent years, 508 compliance has been discussed in various forums. As a result of discussions with staff at Yucca Mountain Site Office, it was learned that some sites are working towards 508 compliance at the document level as opposed to the web site level. This was discussed on the STIP call to 1) open the topic up for discussion and see what other sites are doing in this area; and 2) report that this will likely be an agenda topic at the Spring STIP meeting and Bonna Savarise has agreed to share information at that time. To summarize, Yucca Mountain is working with their searchable PDF documents to tag them and is applying advanced techniques so that they can be accessible to users with disabilities and read using a screen reader. One reason that Yucca Mountain has focused on this is because of the number of documents they manage which relate to the licensing and the license application process. During the call, no other site representatives reported that they were working with 508 compliance at the document level but there was consensus that this was a topic of interest for future discussions.

Miscellaneous (All)

Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Judy Gilmore) - On September 26, 2006, President Bush signed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 which directs OMB to create a publicly accessible government spending database and a website that the average citizen can access and use to find information on grants and contracts greater that $25000

Recently Sharon and Walt had a conference call with contacts in Headquarters Procurement who have been tracking this piece of legislation. Walt and Sharon made sure that our Procurement contacts were aware of the existing systems that include this type of information. For example, OSTI manages for the CFO the DOE R&D Tracking System which includes data from the DOE labs and OSTI maintains a publicly accessible web database called "DOE R&D Project Summaries" (see www.osti.gov/rdprojects).  It should be noted that the new Act is broader than R&D. It is not clear how these new requirements will be implemented within DOE in the months ahead, but at this time, STIP representatives should be aware of this new piece of legislation

Energy Science and Technology Software Center (Kim Buckner) - Program Manager for the Energy Science and Technology Software Center, participated in the STIP call on Wednesday, September 27.  She requested that each site provide her with updated software contact information.  She announced that a software review would begin sometime in January and this information would be useful.

Patent Hold Documents (Patty Simmons) - At the STIP meeting in April, Patty distributed lists with detailed information on documents with a Patent Hold and report dates well past the sunset date allowing release from the patent hold to several sites. You were asked to review these documents and change the status as appropriate. Please send an email to Patty at simmonsp@osti.gov detailing your current status on the review and release of these Patent records. Also, let Patty know if you need an updated list.