This database provides a common starting place for searching across a range of standards‐related data. It provides an especially useful interface for searching across a range of chemical and physical data, but includes a number of interesting research sets in areas of materials engineering, biology and mathematics. Many of the resources, such as the NIST Chemistry WebBook are also easily adapted to classroom use and can be integrated into information literacy assignments. Most of the resources listed or linked to on the site provide free access to information; exceptions include the thermo databases and the most current version of X‐ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy Database (Version 4.0) – although for this a prior version was available for free. The front page also promises access to the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data (JPCRD), an AIP journal and while the search engine provided works well, most articles written since 2000 appear available to order, not free full‐text.
The site allows searching by keyword, substance name and properties – but it should be noted that this really only works well for the chemistry and physics data. In particular, the substance search offers a very useful advanced search feature that allows users to combine chemical name fragments. Searching elements is accomplished through a periodic table interface. A search on “gold” turned up nuggets of information across a wide range of databases.
Users looking for material outside the scope of chemistry and physics should click on the descriptions of NIST free databases on the left side of the main screen. This provides a list with brief descriptions of databases ranging from The Visible Cement Data Set – pictures of what cement made with various water to cement ratios and periods of hydration look like, to The Matrix Market, a “visual repository of test data for use in comparative studies of algorithms for numerical linear algebra […]”. For the more biologically inclined, the site provides access to the Human Mitochondrial Protein Database, which draws together information from international sources and links back to them for further information. Like most of the biological tools, this is not searched as part of the gateway search tool. Many of the databases also provide links to related resources and projects.
Some of the database links on the list do not lead directly to the named sites – e.g. fire research led to the Engineering Laboratory where it was relatively easy to find the Fire Research Division. It may be that the list has not kept up with name and address changes.
There are very useful topic lists of the NIST databases that are unfortunately harder to find than they should be. However, if you click on online subscription databases from the left‐side menu, you can see the list by topic areas. Each of these topics lists NIST free and subscription databases and notes which are searchable through the gateway search engine. This information is very useful and should be more prominently placed in the site.
The NIST Data Gateway provides a useful clearing centre for reliable reference data that could take hours to find on other sites. While its main intended audience are researchers, many of its resources are easily adaptable as teaching tools. It is a site that repays time spent exploring, as well as searching. Many of the individual database sites are soliciting feedback and on one, the feedback link reads: “do you find this service useful? Help us justify it”. This suggests that if librarians and researchers find these sites useful, now would be a good time to say so.
