Best Practices for Collaborating with Colleagues, Industry and Information Seekers: The TRAIL Story

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Virtual Conference, Special Library Association, September 20, 2020

Daureen Nesdill served as Moderator. She explained how TRAIL started 14 years ago as an effort to preserve federal technical documents and then provided information on the current digital holdings and how this nationwide project identified, collected and processed reports. Zac Painter then explained how NEAR (Nielsen Engineering And Research) a Silicon Valley corporation wanted to donate its library of reports to Stanford. He explained the process of deciding which holdings were sent to TRAIL, to Stanford's engineering collections, or discarded. Because NEAR had not had a corporate librarian for several years, some of the classified technical reports could not be sent for digitization by TRAIL, because there was no one to verify whether the report had been declassified. Finally Isabel Altamirano showed how the reports can be used for business intelligence, science literacy, history of STEM, and sources for undergraduate engineering students' research projects and for graduate students' literature reviews. She recounted how she uses TRAIL for personal research on historical engineering events.

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Best Practices for Collaborating with Colleagues, Industry and Information Seekers: The TRAIL Story

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