The widest practicable dissemination: the NASA technical report server

摘要

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 established NASA and charged it to "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of informaiton concerning (-) its activities and the results thereof." The search for innovative methods to distribute NASA's information lead a grass-roots team to create the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS), which uses the World Wide Web and other popular Internet-based informaiton systems as search engines. The NTRS is an inter-center effort which provides uniform access to various distributed publication servers residing on the Internet. Users have immediate desktop access to technical publications from NASA centers and institutes. The NTRS is comprised of several units, some constructed especially for inclusion in NTRS, and others that are existing NASA publication services that NTRS reuses. This paper presents the NTRS architecture, usage metrics, and the lessons learned while implementing and maintaining the services over the initial 6-month period.