ftp:unix.hensa.ac.ukpubmiscukc.reportscomp.sciabstracts1-92



12-96 : Technical Reports Search Service
        (Maggie Bowman)


Institutions and individuals actively engaged in research
disseminate their results and experiences in a variety of ways:
journals, books, technical reports, conference presentations.
Books and papers submitted to journals are usually restricted by
the publishers' copyright, whereas technical reports, conference
proceedings and other documents are usually freely available. 
Documents in this second category may represent the leading edge
of research, containing valuable information of interest to other
researchers, but there is no widely accepted standard method for
dissemination of this kind of document.  Often, this material is
overlooked because interested parties are unaware of its
existence.

The Technical Reports Search service aims to solve some of these
problems.  It provides a centralised access point, via the World
Wide Web, to collections of documents stored on ftp sites around
the world. A user can perform searches over all the documents
included in the service, or access an individual collection and
retrieve any document of interest.

Authors and Document Collection Maintainers can easily include
their documents in the service whilst maintaining total control
over all the documents they make available.