Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  The announcement of NTRS in Usenet's sci.aeronautics newsgroup on June 6, 1994 .  Note the quaint requirement of " Forms " support (which was not yet available in all web browsers in 1994). Today marks the 30th anniversary of the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) being advertised to the public on the Usenet newsgroup sci.aeronautics .  I've had many noteworthy accomplishments in my career, but I'm especially proud that NTRS continues in name and purpose today.  Naturally, the implementation and architecture have changed several times, but in my field there are not many opportunities to have a project that last 30 years (and counting).   I've talked about the evolution of the NTRS architecture and how it reflected contemporary thinking about DL design before, but I'll provide a summary here.  In 1993, I set up an anonymous FTP server for technical memorandums and technical papers published by Langley Research Center.  I called it the Langley Tech...

In a previous post I covered the shut down of the NASA Technical Report Server , which has since come back online in a reduced capacity .  In this post we examine some of the peculiarities of the current state of NTRS, particularly with respect to Handles and Memento.  Earlier this week I needed to access an old NASA report of mine, ironically enough about NTRS, from 1996: Richard C. Tuey, Mary Collins, Pamela Caswell, Bob Haynes, Michael L. Nelson, Jeanne Holm, Lynn Buquo, Annette Tingle, Bill Cooper and Roy Stiltner, NASAwide Electronic Publishing System-Prototype STI Electronic Document Distribution: Stage-4 Evaluation Report, NASA TM-104630 (parts 1 and 2), May 1996. It is not a particularly enjoyable report; it is the kind of lengthy, multi-authored, sanitized, bureaucratic-engineering report that people write but don't read (a "better" summary can be found in AIAA-95-0964 ).  I probably have a pdf of the report somewhere in my files, but instead I pulle...

At the ResourceSync meeting this week, Simeon Warner brought my attention to the fact that the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) digital library had gone offline on March 19.  Although I have not been involved with it since about 2004, I was the creator of NTRS and it was a central part of my early career .  If you click on http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ now, you can a message saying the service is down.  Technically, you get an "HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" message: $ curl -I http://ntrs.nasa.gov/ HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2013 04:00:14 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) Last-Modified: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:50:02 GMT ETag: "720003-300-4d882e4c05280" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 768 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8  And the body of the page says: The NASA technical reports server will be unavailable for public access while the agency conducts a review of the site's conten...