The NACA Technical Report Server (NACATRS) is both a node in the NASA Technical Report Server and a stand-alone World Wide Web (WWW) site. The NACATRS is dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of reports produced by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).

NACA, which evolved into the predecessor to NASA, existed from 1915 until 1958. The main product of NACA's research is a multi-tiered series of reports, the number of which is estimated to be between 20,000 and 30,000. These reports — especially the ones that address issues of general aviation and the fundamentals of flight — remain in high demand. Although significant collections of NACA documents exist at a handful of NASA centers, universities, and government and industrial research laboratories, no single library contains a complete collection. Furthermore, because of their age, high circulation, and acid-based paper, many of these reports are in poor condition and will cease to be serviceable in the near future. Conversion to digital form is necessary for preservation and for wider dissemination.

The Home Page of the NACATRS provides access for browsing and keyword searching of NACA reports.

At present, the NACATRS collection contains about 2,300 documents, and is growing at a rate of about 30 documents per week. Each NACA document is electronically scanned, generating image data in Tagged Image/Interchange File Format (TIFF). Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is not performed, primarily because NACA publications contain numerous pages of equations, tables, charts, and figures, none of which are well suited for OCR. Instead, the document is converted into a combination of Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Document Format (PDF) files for easier dissemination via the World Wide Web.

The NACATRS offers browsing and keyword searching of its holdings (see figure). Reports are also accessible via the following naming convention: http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/reports/YEAR/naca-REPORTTYPE-NUMBER . For example, the popular NACA Report 1135 is available at http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/reports/1953/naca-report-1135/ . Once a report has been retrieved, it is initially presented in the form of thumbnail images of pages. Clicking on a thumbnail image results in presentation of a large GIF version of the image for easy on-line viewing. As many as ten thumbnail images can be shown at a time, with such options as "next," "previous," "first," and "last" for switching among pages of a large report. Similar options are available for viewing single GIF page images. The user can download the entire report as a single PDF file.

This program was written by Michael L. Nelson of Langley Research Center. For further information, access the Technical Support Package (TSP) free on-line at www.nasatech.com/tsp  under the Information Sciences category.

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