News Release
Microcard Metadata Innovation: TRAIL and JSTOR Digital Stewardship Service
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.
TRAIL has been working since 2018 to digitize the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) microcard collection housed at the University of Arizona. The full digitization effort began in 2020, encompassing 33,000 reports across more than 50,000 microcards. Cataloging started in 2021, and as of September 2025, just over 20% of the reports have been cataloged and made freely available through the TRAIL search interface.
Cataloging the entire collection using traditional methods would require more than seven years of full-time work by a single person. To accelerate access, TRAIL is partnering with JSTOR, which in 2025 launched a cloud-based archival solution that uses AI technology to assist with workflows like metadata creation. Through this collaboration, TRAIL expects to receive basic metadata for the remaining digitized reports, which will be enhanced and transformed into catalog records. The goal is to make at least minimal records for the full collection publicly available within the next two years.
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.