DEVELOPMENT OF A TECHNICAL REPORTS SERVICE AT THE HIGHER-EDUCATION-NATIONAL-SOFTWARE-ARCHIVE IN THE UK

Institutions and individuals actively engaged in research disseminate their results and experiences in a variety of ways: journals, books, t echnical reports, conference presentations. Books and papers submitted to journals are often restricted by the publishers' copyright, wherea s technical reports, conference proceedings and other documents are us ually freely available. Documents in this second category may represen t the leading edge of research, containing valuable information of int erest to other researchers, but there is no widely accepted standard m ethod for dissemination of this kind of document. Often, this material is overlooked because interested parties are unaware of its existence . The Technical Reports Service of HENSA (Higher Education National So ftware Archive) aims to solve some of these problems. It provides a ce ntralised access point, via the World Wide Web, to collections of rele vant documents stored on FTP sites around the world. A user can perfor m searches over all the documents included in the service, or access a n individual collection and retrieve any document of interest. Authors and document collection maintainers can easily include their document s in the service whilst maintaining total control over all the documen ts they make available.