TRAIL Celebrates 10 Years of Providing Access to Government Agency Information

The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), of which WSU Libraries is a part, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year of digitizing and providing permanent access to more than 53,000 government technical reports.

According to its website, TRAIL was formed to meet the challenges of access to technical report literature. These reports are rapidly disappearing from library shelves and documents collections. WSU Libraries joined TRAIL in 2010 and is one of more than three dozen members.

The library is a rich source of scientific and technical information from many government agencies, such as the National Bureau of Standards, Federal Energy Administration, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Mines, Atomic Energy Commission, and Fish and Wildlife Service. TRAIL is also working to make older materials, especially pre-1975 documents, available for review and permanently accessible.

TRAIL selects and submits technical reports for digitization into two repositories: the HathiTrust and the University of North Texas (UNT) Digital Library. TRAIL provides a search interface (www.technicalreports.org) for technical report metadata, while the HathiTrust and UNT repositories are full-text searchable and openly accessible to all users.

Note: WSU Libraries graphic designer Amy Grey donated her expertise and time to design the 10^th anniversary logo for TRAIL.