GWLA Federal Technical Reports Project Historical Outline The discussion began at the University of Arizona (UA), then at meetings of the American Library Association (ALA ) and the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) on a possible project to digitize U.S. federal technical reports to make them much more visible and searchable. The discussions were led by Maliaca Oxnam of UA. The idea was to create a demonstration project that could be used to explore various problems and successes that might be realized from a national, collaborative technical report digitization, access and preservation project. If funded, the demonstration project would be small (less than 500 reports or 50,000 pages), but just large enough that some technical and user problems could be identified and worked out. GPO showed interest in such a project but had no funding. However, word was received at UA that Bernie Reilly at Center for Research Libraries (CRL) was interested. In December a group from UA met with Bernie, who agreed to shop the idea around to CRL member libraries to gauge their interest. The Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) opened discussions on possible new strategic directions the Alliance could take. In response, UA submitted a proposal to develop a collaborative project with the CRL to identify, digitize and provide open access to federal technical reports.A straw poll was conducted over the TECHREPORTS list asking subscribers which agencies’ reports they were the most interested in. Early 2006 Maliaca and Bernie talked again at the ALA Midwinter Conference and Bernie reiterated and strengthened the interest of CRL in this digitization project. Results of the straw poll were reported. GWLA announced in March that the UA proposal had been accepted as one of four strategic initiatives for the Alliance. A small group of GWLA Deans and Directors met to expand each initiative into a program outline and suggested next steps. Mid 2006 GWLA approved the outline for the tech report digitization project and the GWLA/CRL Federal Technical Reports Task Force was created to move the project forward. At this point the composition of the Task Force was primarily engineering librarians. Maliaca was selected as the Chair of the Task Force. The Linda Hall Library expressed a particular interest in the project and agreed to assign an individual to work on the Task Force, as well as to do a 200-500 report digitization test to identify costs. The University of Arizona agreed to provide seed money for the project. Money was transferred to CRL to avoid fiscal year spending deadlines at UA. The Task Force met for the first time for two days in August. At that meeting the project was reviewed in its entirety and questions and next steps were captured for each stage. The Task Force members left the meeting having:
This was followed
Late 2006 Calls for interest were sent out on various e-lists asking for institutional interest, work identified above was carried out, long-term digitization plans were developed, and a prototype system was developed at the University of Hawaii. Publications of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) collections were identified for scanning. Early 2007 Task force members met in January at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City to continue intensive planning for the pilot and for a longer-phased project. Digitization quality control checks were developed. AEC collections were scanned and added to the pilot site. Pilot project was named TRAIL – Technical Report Archive and Image Library. GWLA Deans and Directors agreed to support the project with $4000 per GWLA institution - ~$120,000 total. GWLA added a Digital Collections Program Officer to its staff. He joined the Task Force as the GWLA representative/liaison to the group. Mid 2007 A gift of U.S. Bureau of Mines tech report series was received by the University of Arkansas. This becomes the next major set of materials to digitize and the University of Arkansas becomes the first “node”. The University of Michigan Digitization Project (Michigan) offered to become involved. They will funnel the tech reports identified by the Task Force for inclusion in the project into the stream of materials UM supplies to Google as one of its partners. Michigan receives a copy of all scanned documents they send to Google. Development of a separate interface that would allow searching of just the technical report content was proposed. Much discussion ensued within the Task Force and with Michigan in fleshing out this proposal. Late 2007 The Task Force met as a group again in November at Linda Hall Library. The focus of the meeting was on how to develop a process and workflow that will allow for the processing of a much larger volume of material, as made possible by the offer from Michigan to do the scanning. The Task Force was re-charged to address a production system (as opposed to a pilot) and two new members were added to the Task Force. The new members were both government documents librarians because of the need for additional expertise on that front and the loss of the lone government documents librarian from the initial Task Force. New tasks lists were created and assigned to Task Force members in the weeks following this meeting. Stanford, as another member of the original “Google 5” expresses an interest in becoming involved in the project, in particular to design a user interface to the scanned documents. A permanent project name was agreed upon – TRAIL, and the name of the group became the TRAIL Task Force. Early 2008 Conversations begin with OCLC about having them create collection sets of records for each series (or group of series from a particular agency) digitized by the Task Force. Linda Hall Library bowed out of their participation in the project since their commitment was only for the pilot. The Task Force welcomed four new members, three of whom were government documents librarians. The updated version of the Task Force met as a group in Chicago to bring the new members up to speed, decide on future directions, identify tasks, etc. Point people/groups are identified to address the work necessary to complete the tasks identified at the Chicago meeting: The “Collection Group” subgroup of the Task Force was created. The objective of this group is to define the collections to be included in the project. The “External Communication” subgroup of the Task Force was created. The objective of this group is to develop a project Website to inform the public and project partners about the work of the Task Force and how to become involved. Mid 2008 A skeletal Web site has been initiated using free Google space for hosting and creation. Much work ensues in populating the site with content. A project internal tracking system was developed at UA. A final decision was made on the TRAIL logo. Late 2008 Work began at a second “node” to begin the processing of all remaining report series of the National Bureau of Standards.
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