The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), a long-standing program of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), is advancing its mission to preserve and provide access to government technical reports by joining the JSTOR Digital Stewardship Service charter program.
In 2018, TRAIL initiated a project to digitize the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) microcard collection from the University of Arizona. Microcards are an opaque microform implemented and used by the AEC starting in the 1950s. The full project, digitizing 33,000 reports printed on more than 50,000 microcards, began in 2020. After the digitization was complete, cataloging began in 2021, and as of September 2025, only a little over 20% of the reports have been catalogued and are freely available through the TRAIL search interface.
Cataloging that entire collection (33,000 reports) using standard cataloging practices would take one person working full-time more than seven years to complete. By participating in this two-year JSTOR partnership, TRAIL anticipates receiving basic metadata for the remaining digitized microcard reports. Additional work is then needed to create catalog records and add any necessary additional data. TRAIL is excited to learn how using SeekLight may speed up our cataloging and ultimately have at least minimal records available to the public.
This partnership reflects CRL and TRAIL’s commitment to innovation in digital preservation and access, ensuring that valuable historical materials are discoverable and usable by researchers worldwide.