Edward Fox, Jim French, Paul Jones, Kurt Maly, Michael Nelson, and Mohammad Zubair are leading an effort to work toward moving the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) into a sustainable, Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org/) conformant framework.
Virginia's Internet Technology Innovation Center (http://www.internettic.org/) has provided $30K of support that will go largely to shifting NCSTRL into the OAI sphere, through efforts at Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech. Paul Jones and the team of ibiblio.org (see http://www.ibiblio.org/) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will run the EPrints software (see http://www.eprints.org/) to help in this process. At Old Dominion University, the ARC (see http://arc.cs.odu.edu/) and Kepler software (see http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/maly/04maly.html) will be used.
The initial work in this process should lead to an OAI-based operation of NCSTRL by October 2001, with four NCSTRL collections in Virginia demonstrating the feasibility of both saving the historical NCSTRL collection and pointing the way for a new paradigm of disseminating Computer Science technical reports. Our aim is to demonstrate that our approach can be linked with related projects -- e.g., the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library (see http://www.nsdl.nsf.gov/) and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (see other articles in this issue of D-Lib Magazine) -- and can be expanded to other disciplines as well. For the purpose of fully moving NCSTRL into the OAI world, we will seek further funding.
There should be little impact initially on the operations at most NCSTRL sites, and the service at the NCSTRL web site should provide similar capabilities to what resulted from previous NCSTRL support. Those involved in NCSTRL or otherwise interested in this effort are encouraged to read the proposal about the OAI based Technical Reference library.