Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
CISTI (M-55) south face
Country	Canada
Type	national science library
Established	1924 as library of the National Research Council of Canada; 1967 as national science library
Location	1200 Montreal Road, NRC Campus, building M-55
Branches	Charlottetown; Fredericton; Halifax; Montreal; Ottawa; Penticton; Saguenay; Saskatoon; St. John's; Vancouver; Victoria; and Winnipeg.
Collection
Items collected	books, journals, technical reports, databases, in the areas of science, technology, engineering and medicine.
Size	50,000 serial titles, 800,000 books, over 2 million technical reports (microfiche).
Access and use
Circulation	(Library) (Archival)
Other information
Director	Pam Bjornson
Website	NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI)

The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (commonly NRC-CISTI or simply CISTI) began in 1924 as the library of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), the leading agency for research and development in Canada. This library took on the role of national science library unofficially in 1957 and became the official National Science Library in 1967. The name CISTI came in 1974 to reflect the wide scope of services provided and the increasing role in the development of electronic information products and services for the science and technology community.^[1]

CISTI's headquarters in Ottawa houses one of the world's most comprehensive collections of publications in science, technology, engineering and medicine. CISTI branches are co-located with NRC institutes and programmes across Canada.

The NRC Research Press joined with CISTI in 1992. On September 1, 2010, NRC Research Press became a private company called Canadian Science Publishing and is no longer directly affiliated with CISTI or the NRC.^[2]

Partnership initiatives[edit]

As of June 2008, CISTI is a member of the WorldWideScience Alliance, which provides a global science gateway.^[3]

In 2009 a joint partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the United States National Library of Medicine and CISTI launched PubMed Central Canada.

CISTI is a founding member of DataCite, a worldwide consortium for allocating DOIs to datasets.^[4]

Scientific article discovery[edit]

In June 2011 CISTI launched the CISTI Mobile website which provides location and search services to popular mobile devices including Android, Blackberry and iPhone platforms. The mobile website provides federated searching across several science and technology information sources at and beyond CISTI. The site is likely the first Canadian Federal library mobile website.

In April 2010 CISTI implemented a federated search system allowing the public to search its local and licensed resources together - including a combined search of NPArC, CISTI Discover, CISTI Catalogue and the NRC Research Press. NRC researchers are also able to combine searches with these and other publisher sites and databases that CISTI licenses on their behalf.

In June 2009 CISTI launched the NRC Publications Archive (NPArC), an institutional repository providing a single place to search and discover the scientific publications of the National Research Council. It contains tens of thousands of freely available scientific articles, technical reports, book chapters and other publications produced by NRC research efforts.

In 2008 CISTI launched a web-based interface allowing for the search and retrieval of millions of articles and citations called CISTI Discover.

Data and data discovery and stewardship[edit]

CISTI is a leader and participant in a number of initiatives to support data stewardship and discovery in Canada, including being a founding member of DataCite. In May 2012, CISTI launched DataCite Canada, a data registration service that allows Canadian data centres to register research data sets and assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs).

It has established the Gateway to Scientific Data, a database supporting the discovery of Canadian scientific, technical and medical datasets. CISTI is also a founding member and active participant of Research Data Canada.

Document delivery[edit]

From the late 1990s until 2010 CISTI was one of the largest providers of documents in the areas of science technology and medicine in the world.

In 2009 CISTI announced that document delivery services will be provided in partnership with Infotrieve.^[5] As of June 3, 2010, CISTI replaced its system of web document ordering (IntelliDoc) with a new system maintained by Infotrieve, supported with the CISTI collection.^[6]

Organizational membership[edit]

CISTI is a member of

• the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
• the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL)
• the Special Libraries Association (SLA)
• the Canadian Library Association (CLA)
• the Canadian Health Libraries Association (CHLA)
• the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
• International DataCite Federation
• International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI)
• Research Data Canada

References[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: CISTI

External links[edit]

• NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI)
• History of the NRC Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
• NRC-CISTI on Facebook
• HLWIKI International: Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)
• World Wide Science

Coordinates: 45°26′38″N 75°37′10″W / 45.44375°N 75.61950°W / 45.44375; -75.61950