For almost 20 years technical reports owned by the SUL science and engineering libraries were cataloged and searchable in a separate Folio database called the "Technical Reports File". For various reasons these records were never in Socrates. This situation has finally ended.

In July, after much staff effort, the technical report records were migrated into Unicorn. Many people were involved in this effort, including:

Rebecca Wesley - Initiated project, chaired Tech Report Migration Committee, and spent long hours in SPIRES preparing the data for migration.

Vitus Tang and Rita Lunnon - Wrote detailed specifications for the data migration. Vitus also worked extensively with the SERG librarians and with the contractor, Howard Marantz, on data extraction from SPIRES.

Karen Kalinsky and Matthew Ahmed - Loaded the records into Unicorn.

Charlotte Derksen, Karen Greig, Stella Ota, Chun Tang, and Linda Yamamoto - Checked the test loads of records prior to final loading. Charlotte, Karen, and Linda were also on the Migration Committee.

You can now search Unicorn or Socrates and retrieve records for technical reports owned by the following libraries: Branner Earth Sciences Library, Engineering Library, Mathematical and Computer Sciences Library, Physics Library, and the Stanford Auxiliary Library. Technical reports owned by other libraries, such as Green Library's Government Documents, have always been in the catalog.

Many of the reports can be located in Socrates by author, title, and performing organization. Some reports, including NACA, NASA, and AGARD, are only catalogued by report series such as "NASA Technical Memorandum". In these cases it's best to search under the series name, and limit the format to "serials" to see what library owns the report series. For other reports you have the option in Unicorn to limit to "format = TECHRPTS".

We're hoping that having technical reports in Socrates will increase their visibility to, and use by, the science and engineering community.

For more information on technical reports, including how to find reports on a particular topic and how to find full-text technical reports on the Internet go to:

Curatorial Assistant (8/06/01); REQ# J012161

For a complete description of other open positions within SUL/AIR, visit the Human Resources Web site at: