Digitizing Technical Reports

Users clearly desire access to end-products rather than information about the end-products. To meet this requirement, we must solve the issues surrounding access to and retrieval of full images. Library Without Walls projects have tackled these issues by providing desktop digital access to unclassified Los Alamos technical report images.

The phase 1 goal was to put the full text and scanned page images of over 10,000 Los Alamos technical reports into a local server with an easy to use retrieval protocol. Unclassified Los Alamos technical reports were a logical beginning step to develop and test these capabilities because they are a part of our institutional memory and no copyright issues exist. The Los Alamos technical reports go back to 1943 and contain reports of research, conference proceedings, and environmental reports. Furthermore, this effort supports our goal of making the products of Los Alamos scientific research widely available to the public. Some of the more complex research and development issues this project faced include:

• Supporting viewers that will work well on virtually any network machine over the Internet;
• Navigating through large image and text files;
• Authenticating archival digital reports;
• High quality production scanning and optical character recognition conversion of images to searchable text of microfiche and old paper archives;
• Finding cost-effective and high performance storage for very large archive image files.

The electronic reports may be accessed both from the Research Library's online catalog and the Los Alamos Unclassified Publications Database.

Since the initial project was completed to digitize the archive of technical reports, processes have been put into place to digitize new reports, both formal and informal, as they are published.