TRAIL, the Technical Report Archive & Image Library is the product of a collaboration initiated by the University of Arizona, which draws on the resources of the greater Western Library Alliance, the Center for Research Libraries, the Hathi Trust and numerous contributing libraries. The project seeks to digitize and make accessible a collection of US government technical reports, focusing on those published prior to 1975. Currently the database is heavily weighted to series from the Bureau of Mines, the Department of Energy and the National Standards Bureau, providing access to valuable publications that were increasingly hard to find on library shelves. Sample searches turned up works from the early 1900s to the 1990s, and include everything from mine safety and early ore discoveries to early work in nuclear energy and solar processes for distilling fresh water. The resources will interest geologists, science and social historians, and the project appears to be a good model for similar work in other fields.
The opening basic search interface is uncluttered and the simple search works well and quickly. The system automatically searches simple word variants: locomotive also finds locomotives (unfortunately miner also brings up minerals, which is less helpful), and the default, if searching more than one word, is “and”. The search is not full text, however, and is apparently limited to core bibliographic information. While there are no notes or help screens for this, it seems to be possible to do phrase searching using quotations. There is also the option for Advanced Search providing field‐limited searching, phrase searching and truncation. This provides an easy way to browse reports by issuing agency or by document type, which allows users to browse an individual series. A useful page, www.crl.edu/grn/trail/current‐activities/Series‐List provides a list of which serials are present or being considered for inclusion.
Search results are presented clearly and there are options for limiting results by decade, subject or author. Clicking on the title of a promising document leads to a record on either the Hathi platform or one maintained by the University of North Texas. Both provide extra metadata, The Hathi records provide a link to the full catalogue record that also brings up suggestions for related materials both within and outside of the TRAIL database. Both interfaces allow you to search within documents and provide several options for viewing, including thumbnail images which are very useful for quickly locating maps and diagrams. Both also provide permanent links or citations for the documents. Considering the relative age of many of the items, the scans are very clear. The full text was available for most documents checked by the reviewer. Where reports are not available, generally for copyright related reasons, the system links through to WorldCat to enable users to locate a nearby print copy.
While the NTIS provides access to a much broader range of publications, free full text is not available there, and other government document suites typically provide limited access to pre‐1990 materials. The TRAIL project has rescued valuable, early documents from obscurity, decay and perhaps disposal. In an era of expanding electronic collections and decreasing shelf space, pre‐1950s reports might be seen as easy targets for weeding. Some of the documents have been digitized by Google and the site's FAQ says that they hope to make them available through that gateway, but items checked by the reviewer that were full text in the Hathi system were only available as snippets in Google Books. One small quibble is that reports with no date in the appropriate field of the record are classed as being from 1990‐1909. In a number of cases, the date was available elsewhere in the document or record and could be added, or perhaps the database could include a category for “unknown date”.
Overall, TRAIL is a useful resource for a number of niche audiences. Those interested in geology, early work on energy research or the social history evident in changing National Bureau of Standards reports will find it fascinating to search and browse the texts. For those considering similar digitization projects, TRAIL offers an exemplary collaborative model that has resulted in a clean interface providing useful access to relevant and otherwise “lost” materials.
