Scientific videos highlighting exciting research and development (R&D) sponsored by DOE can be searched at ScienceCinema, OSTI’s multimedia product.  As videos, animations, visualizations and other multimedia have become increasingly prominent forms of scientific communication, ScienceCinema was developed in 2011 in partnership with Microsoft Research, using innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology. Searching across large volumes of multimedia content, ScienceCinema allows users to quickly search videos and identify the exact point in the video where the search terms were spoken. Closed captioning capabilities were added in 2013, enabling users to view the audio in textual format,  a breakthrough in accessibility.

ScienceCinema currently contains over 3,300 videos from DOE national laboratories, other DOE research facilities and CERN.  A broad range of energy-related topics are covered. For example, see how companies are improving the efficiency of solar cells in “Solar Innovator,” learn more about the Higgs Boson in “Unraveling the Higgs Boson Discovery” and watch “Breakthrough: Using Microbes to Make Advanced Biofuels” to learn how the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute is using microbes to convert non-food crops and agricultural waste into fuels for cars, trucks and planes.

Recognized as one of DOE’s initiatives in the DOE Open Government Plan 2.0 – for making the federal government more transparent, participatory and collaborative – ScienceCinema will continue to grow as new videos are produced by the laboratories and other research facilities.  As part of OSTI’s role to collect, disseminate and preserve the Department’s scientific output, we look forward to engaging more fully with the STIP community to ensure that DOE’s multimedia-based R&D information is easily accessible and available to the public.