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Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL)

Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) is a national collaborative project initiated by the University of Arizona and the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and that is now a Global Resource Network of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), in cooperation with more than 50 partner institutions.[1] TRAIL's purpose is to digitize, preserve, and make openly available technical reports published primarily before 1976 by agencies of the United States government.[2][3] Technical reports often contain detailed information not published elsewhere, but can be difficult to find.[4] [5]

As of March 2012, the collection includes more than 28,000 reports.[6] Material is currently available from a number of current and former United States goverment agencies, including report series from the Atomic Energy Commission, Bureau of Mines, National Bureau of Standards, and National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, among others. [7]

History of the Project

In the mid-2000's, sci-tech and other librarians had discussions at various conferences on the need to make federal agency technical report content more visible and accessible. A pilot project was envisioned to digitize, preserve and make accessible a small (fewer than 500 reports) collection of government agency technical reports, both as proof of concept and to work through technical and logistical issues. Partners were sought, and CRL expressed interet. In late 2005, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) announced that they would be funding up to four digital initiatives that were in alignment with GWLA's strategic goals at the time. The University of Arizona submitted a proposal to GWLA for a technical report digitization pilot and received funding in early 2006 to begin the project in collaboration with CRL.[8] In mid-2006, the GWLA/CRL Federal Technical Reports Task Force was established to execute the pilot project, with Maliaca Oxnam of the Unversity of Arizona as Chair. As part of the pilot project, appropriate metadata schema were created, a pilot project was established at the University of Hawaii and the first complete series, the Monograph Series of the National Bureau of Standards, was scanned. [9]

The Task Force soon recognized the need to name the pilot project and in early 2007 TRAIL was born. The Task Force expanded the scope of the pilot with content from additional agencies and began to investigate how an ongoing project could be constituted, managed and supported. A major expansion of the project occurred when the University of Michigan and Google became a primary digitiation partner. In late 2007, the Task Force was re-charged by GWLA to investigate development of a production system (as opposed to the pilot). In 2008, Task Force membership was expanded and subgroups were created to address the many additional issues associated with creating and supporting a production system, in particular issues related to collections, communication (both internal and external) and a plethora of technical issues. Additional digitization partners were acquired, technical report series content was solicited from institutions all over the U.S, and the TRAIL logo was adopted and instituted.

2009 laid the groundwork for major changes to TRAIL in 2010. Initial conversation began with the University of Washington on possibly developing a user interface for the production version of TRAIL. In addition, the University of North Texas came on board as a digitzation and hosting partner, and conversations began that would lead to an organizational and administrative restructuring of TRAIL.

TRAIL originated as a GWLA-based initiative, with funding coming almost exclusively from GWLA institutions and CRL. But GWLA's original interest was in supporting the pilot project, and with the move to a more ongoing initiative there became a need to broaden TRAIL's institutional base of support and to look for a way to fund the project on an ongoing basis. In the spring of 2010, TRAIL became a Global Resource Network (GRN) within CRL. A new administrative structure was formed, bylaws were created, officers were elected, a new funding structure was created, and the new incarnation of TRAIL began soliciting institutional members.

In 2010, Maliaca Oxnam won the American Library Association GODORT's Documents to the People Award for her role in directing TRAIL. [10] In 2011, Tim Byrne won the American Library Association GODORT's James Bennett Childs Award and his involvement with TRAIL was mentioned among his contributions to the field. [11]

References

  1. ^ "Advancing Your Search: An Interview with Maliaca Oxnam", Engineering Village Newletter, August 4, 2009, http://mail.elsevier-alerts.com/go.asp?/bEEI001/mECMDQ8/uJQ0Q4/xJEMMQ8
  2. ^ "New TRAIL Database Gives Life to Historic Literature" at http://jeffline.jefferson.edu/aisrnews/?p=1556
  3. ^ "Digitizing makes government reports more available to public." PHYSorg.com. 7 Jan 2011. http://phys.org/news/2011-01-digitizing.html
  4. ^ Laura Sare (2011): Availability of Legacy Government Documents Online, Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 16:1-2, 55-66 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10875301.2011.582824).
  5. ^ Gerry McKiernan. "TRAIL: Technical Reports Archives and Image Library" at http://ref-notes.blogspot.com/2008/11/trail-technical-reports-archives-and.html
  6. ^ Mel DeSart. "Blazing a TRAIL: A Shared Vision and Collaboration Lead to Digitization, Open Access and Preservation of U.S. Government Technical Reports" http://jlsc-pub.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=jlsc
  7. ^ Center for Research Libraries - TRAIL http://www.crl.edu/grn/trail
  8. ^ Daureen Nesdill "How the Agility of Librarians Led to the Development of TRAIL" http://www.sla.org/pdfs/sla2012/ContributedPapersTuesSessionDaureenNesdill.pdf
  9. ^ "Providing OA to pre-1975 govt tech reports", Open Access News. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/12/providing-oa-to-pre-1975-govt-tech.html
  10. ^ "Announcing the 2010 GODORT Awards Winners" http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Announcing_the_2010_GODORT_Awards_Winners
  11. ^ "Announcing the 2011 GODORT Awards Winners" http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Announcing_the_2011_GODORT_Awards_Winners
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