Did you ever wonder what would happen if a bunch of librarians got exasperated enough about the underutilization of a huge corpus of material in their libraries’ collections (largely because of a lack of access points) to actually DO something about it? OK, probably not. But if you ever did, in the case of U.S. government technical reports, TRAIL is what happened. A grassroots effort that originally started as a digitization project associated with the Greater Western Library Alliance; TRAIL is now a member-supported effort which has its administrative home at the Center for Research Libraries.

TRAIL’s mission is to ensure preservation, discoverability, and persistent open access to government technical publications, regardless of form or format. TRAIL addresses that by acquiring, cataloging with MARC records from OCLC, inventorying, digitizing, and making openly accessible U.S. government agency technical reports, in particular older reports that may not have been digitized by the issuing agency. TRAIL allows its content to be crawled by internet search engines such as Google, Bing, etc., so a basic internet search on a relevant topic will turn up TRAIL records in the search results. TRAIL also developed a user interface (at http://www.technicalreports.org) that allows users to search for technical reports acquired and digitized by TRAIL in a variety of ways: by title, author, series, report number, issuing agency, and publication year.

TRAIL currently provides access to over 80,000 reports, with more being processed and added daily. Inventories of exactly which agencies, series, and reports TRAIL has acquired, and by extension, which reports in a given series TRAIL is missing, are provided in the series processing inventories available in the TRAIL libguide (trailguides.crl.edu/series)

TRAIL’s newest project, starting in 2019-2020, will be to digitize and create metadata for a large collection of approximately 15,000 micro-opaque cards, often just referred to as microcards. Many academic and research libraries have microcard collections of various sizes, but some have no way to provide access to the content of those cards, which requires a special viewer, and fewer still have any way for a user to walk away with an electronic file of any of the reports contained on those microcards. TRAIL’s project will lead to openly accessible digital files of the reports contained on these roughly 15,000 cards. For more information or for any questions, please send an email to trail@crl.edu.

Mel DeSart, Head, Engineering Library and Mathematics Research Library, University of Washington, and Chair of TRAIL, 2019-2021 (Guest blogger)

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