STIP Managers Teleconference June 13, 2001

STI Managers/representatives participating in June 13 Teleconference:

Dawn Snelson (CHO), Jeff Richmond (ORISE), Anne Raible (OAK), Mary Allen for Judy Lussie (LLNL), Betty Robinette (Y-12/LMES), Stephanie Janicek (Hanford Site/FDHI), Yvonne Sherman (RLO), Jackie Stack (LANL), Yolanda Bolivar (ALO & NREL), Dave Hamrin (ORNL), Mary White (BNL), Mina Perrin (SRS), Kevin Schmidt (SRS), Kathy Witker (SRS), Betsy Pratt (BPA), Sharon Lee (BHI), Dale Claflin (INEEL). Please send corrections directly to waldropk@osti.gov.

STIP Meeting Plans - Sharon Jordan
Preliminary planning is under way for a STIP meeting for this fall, perhaps the first week of November. No meeting was held last year because of budget constraints. Much has changed, though, particularly with the electronic transition, that would make a meeting useful. Agenda topics are being collected. The STIP Strategic Plan needs to be updated to reflect accomplishments and new strategies such as harvesting, among other things. Location is up in the air; a "travel hub" is still a desirable goal. Chicago, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque had previously offered to host. Washington is also an option. OSTI will talk with the potential host sites. E-mail Sharon at jordans@osti.gov with any suggested agenda items.

Regarding InForum, OSTI is still working with the CIO to try to have a joint InForum and Annual IT Conference in Spring 2002.

Science.gov - Sharon Jordan
OSTI participated in a workshop on "Strengthening the Public Information Infrastructure for Science held in the DC area on April 18-19. A number of agencies, universities, and other information professionals participated. The key result of the meeting was to form an interagency "Science.gov" Alliance, which would develop a government science information web site, a designated FirstGov for Science site. A technical team has begun development, including identifying agency content. OSTI is compiling a list of DOE URLs, including labs, with appropriate science information content. If you are aware of anything that may help the team, contact OSTI.

Call for E-PhySci Articles - Sharon Jordan
Please send Kathy Waldrop (waldropk@osti.gov) articles for the July issue of the E-PhySci newsletter. One section is the "Featured Scientist," which will likely be on Enrico Fermi, to commemorate his birth. Other sections feature new technologies, products or services, meetings/conferences, and other news of interest in the physical sciences. Articles for the July issue need to be submitted to Kathy by COB June 22. E-PhySci is issued quarterly. Previous issues are archived at the OSTI Home Page at www.osti.gov/ephyscinews.

Status of Guide and Forms - Susan Tackett
OSTI is continuing to finalize a few more minor changes to the Guide. Availability of the final draft is expected to occur in the July time frame. In accordance with direction provided by the Headquarters Directives Management Group, the Guide may be implemented when the final draft is completed, prior to being formally issued/announced via the Departmental Explorer System. There will be an INFO-M announcement to the STIP Group when the document goes to HQ for announcement. The document and a high-level summary of the changes will be made available via the STIP Home Page. Significant changes are being made to Part II, Section 2, dealing with Direct Procurement (financial assistance recipients and non-major contractors) reporting. The Guide wording has not been finalized pending release of new Office of Procurement and Assistance Policy (MA-51) guidance. MA-51 is uncomfortable releasing the final guidance prior to the new 241.3 form completing the DOE forms approval and announcement process.

The forms approval process is nearing completion. The new 241.3 and revised 241.1 and 241.2 forms have been sent to the DOE Forms Manager for concurrence. They will be put into use upon their being approved and posted on the DOE Forms Site with a link to the E-Link system. OSTI has asked for expedited approval of the 241.3 form; however, the draft of the 241.3 form is available on E-Link and is currently being used for submission. The current versions of the 241.1 and 241.2 are available on E-Link as well.

The revised 241.4 form for software submittal is under development as a PDF fillable application. Because of OSTI resource constraints, we were not able to complete necessary development to convert software submittals to an electronic process at this time. A draft version of the form is available on E-Link.

E-Link Issues - Rita Hohenbrink
Password protected, encrypted full-text - When creating PDF full text to upload to OSTI, make sure it is not password protected or encrypted. When creating the PDF files, do not select the "Do not allow changes" option. When the full text is made available through the Information Bridge, there is an option to view single PDF pages of the document. If the original PDF file is password protected or encrypted, the software to create the single page PDFs doesn't work.

Bad URLs - If you input a site URL for the full-text, an automated procedure checks to see if it is a valid URL. Remember, it should be to the specific document, not a home page or login page. If the program finds that the URL is not valid, it sends out an email "Inaccessible URL for ... (report number)." If you receive an email like that and you are sure it is a good URL that is accessible, send an email to 241user@osti.gov. In some instances, firewall problems at both the site and OSTI have been a cause.

Revising Records/Documents - If you find any fields in an E-Link record to be incorrect, you can fix them yourselves with the Record Correction facility. Do not send changes to 241user@osti.gov. Also, you can replace the full-text if it needs replacing. If you don't have an electronic version of your full text, you can download the one from E-Link, make changes to the PDF version using Adobe Acrobat and upload the revised full text. If the full text was originally paper, don't forget to change the medium code to Electronic Document on the 241 form. Many records received since 1992 have been migrated to E-link, thus allowing sites to correct records and access documents sent to OSTI in paper (prior to the launching of the E-Link web site).

You can find a detailed description on the Record Correction facility in the E-Link Help. This is what it says:
Sites may review the status of their submitted announcement records and may revise or correct data in a specific record on-line. You may also delete records. Records can also be revised in the batch mode using SGML, but records can only be deleted on-line. To edit (correct or revise) or delete records on-line, select the "SEARCH/EDIT" button in the left frame. A search criteria box will pop up where you can enter any of the following fields. Some fields require exact matches, and some will do word searching within the field. The fields are:

• OSTI ID - must be an exact match, example 12345
• REPORT NO - can search on the whole report number, search on specific pieces that are part of the report number separated by special characters like dash (-) or slash (/), or use the wildcard character % if you do not specify the entire report number, examples: RN-1234-part1or 1234 or RN-1234%
• CONTRACT NO - can search on the whole contract number, search on specific pieces that are part of the contract number separated by special characters like dash (-) or slash (/), or use the wildcard character percent (%) if you do not specify the entire report number, examples:
  • AC50-99XY12345
  • AC50
  • %XY12345
• TITLE - can search on all or part of a title; you can search on partial words if you use the wildcard character percent (%)
• AUTHOR - can search on all or part of the author's name; you can search on partial words if you use the wildcard character percent (%)

No matter what search criteria you use, your results will only include records provided by your site.

To edit a record, select the EDIT button for the record you wish to edit on the Search Results screen. This will bring the record up in the 241.1 web form. The top of the form has two new fields: "Revised Announcement" and "Revised Product." You must fill out one of them. If you are planning to send/submit new full text, select "Revised Product." If you are only changing information on the announcement record itself such as author or title or report number, select "Revised Announcement." Then change any fields you wish. Only users with releasing official authority can release revised records.

Product Update - Sharon Jordan
OSTI has started work on a project to make limited-distribution STI web-accessible to DOE and DOE contractors. Several HQ Programs are involved is this effort, as is the General Counsel's Office, related to access limitations and appropriate levels of access, such as SBIR, ECI, and other restrictions. The goal is to have the web product ready late CY 2001.

The DOE-only version of Information Bridge is now ORACLE-based and easier to use, with some of the features added that were added earlier to the public InfoBridge. Registration for passwords can now be done via the web site at www.osti.gov/doebridge.

Miscellaneous - All
Some sites have seen interest in Foreign National potential access to things like Export Controlled Information, Applied Technology, etc.

Next call will be August 8, second Wednesday of August.