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 part of the Global Resources Network of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), in cooperation with more than 50 partner institutions and personal members. TRAIL's purpose is to digitize, preserve, and make openly available technical reports published by agencies of the United States government (initially limited to those before 1975, but expanded in 2015 to remove the date restriction). Technical reports often contain detailed information not published elsewhere, but can be difficult to find.
Contents
As of March 2012, the collection includes more than 28,000 reports. Material is currently available from a number of current and former United States government agencies, including report series from the Atomic Energy Commission, Bureau of Mines, National Bureau of Standards, and National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, among others.
History of the Project
TRAIL started as a pilot project to digitize, preserve and make accessible a small collection of government agency technical reports, both as proof of concept and to work through technical and logistical issues. The University of Arizona submitted a proposal to Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) for a technical report digitization pilot and received funding in early 2006 to begin the project in collaboration with CRL. Led by Maliaca Oxnam of the University of Arizona, the GWLA/CRL Federal Technical Reports Task Force created the appropriate metadata schema, established a pilot search interface at the University of Hawaii and scanned the first complete series, the Monograph Series of the National Bureau of Standards.
TRAIL is now part of the Global Resource Network (GRN) within CRL.
Digitized Series
The list of digitized series also includes decisions on series not digitized or considered. Decisions are current and subject to future reviews.
Completely digitized series include
Many other series are in progress, for example:
Access
The search interface is hosted by the University of Washington and searches all TRAIL content found at HathiTrust and UNT.
Awards
2012
2011
2010
Member Institutions
Arizona State University / University of Arizona / University of Arkansas / Baylor University / Brigham Young University / California Institute of Technology / University of California, Berkeley / University of California, San Diego / University of Cincinnati / Colorado State University / University of Colorado / Georgia Institute of Technology / Harvard University / University of Houston / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign / Indiana University / Iowa State University / University of Iowa / Kansas State University / University of Massachusetts Amherst / Massachusetts Institute of Technology / University of Nevada, Las Vegas / University of New Mexico / University of North Texas / University of Notre Dame / Oklahoma State University / Oregon State University / University of Pennsylvania / Pennsylvania State University / Princeton University / Purdue University / Rice University / Stanford University / University of Texas at Austin / Texas A & M University / Texas Tech University / University of Texas at San Antonio / United States Government Publishing Office / Utah State University / University of Utah / Washington State University / University of Washington / University of Wisconsin