Until the mid-90s, the method of disseminating DOE research results was largely through bibliographic databases. NSA is an historic record of nuclear research from the early 1940s through June 1976. Together these databases offer more than 5 million records in energy science and technology. Then along came the Information Age. Today I will highlight a few of these.
Researchers communicate their findings in three main ways.
Three virtual collections each focus on one of those. Technical reports and other forms of gray literature are one means that scientists report their findings. The first significant advance for electronic dissemination at DOE actually occurred in late 1997 with gray literature. By scanning full text of DOE-sponsored gray literature, including technical reports and conference papers, each word of each report is searchable. There are now over 55,000 digital items and over 4.3 million searchable pages.