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Explains how the NASA Technical Report Server, a World Wide Web report distribution NASA technical publications service, has been modified for performance enhancement, greater protocol support and human interface optimization. Results include: parallel database queries, significantly decreasing user access times by an average factor of 2.3; access from clients behind firewalls and/or proxies which truncate excessively long Uniform Resource Locators; access to non‐Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) databases and compatibility with the Z39‐50.3 protocol; and a streamlined user interface.

Considers a formal publication to represent an abstract to a larger body of work: a pvramid of scientific and technical information (STI). While this abstract may be sufficient for some applications, an in‐depth use or analysis is likely to require the supporting layers from the pyramid. Describes how “buckets” have been developed to preserve this pyramid of STI. Buckets provide an archive‐ and protoeol‐independent container construct in which all related information objects can be logically grouped together, archived, and manipulated as a single object. Furthermore, buckets are active archival objects and can communicate with each other, people, or arbitrary network services. Buckets are an implementation of the Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) DL model. Discusses the motivation, design, and implication of bucket use in DLs with respect to grey literature.

The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and charged it to “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning ... its activities and the results thereof”. The search for innovative methods to distribute NASA′s information led a grassroots team to create the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS), which uses the World Wide Web and other popular Internet‐based information systems.

The purpose of this study is to present an alternative to university ranking lists published in U.S. News & World Report, Times Higher Education, Academic Ranking of World Universities and Money Magazine. A strategy is proposed to mine a collection of university data obtained from Twitter and publicly available online academic sources to compute social media metrics that approximate typical academic rankings of US universities.

The Twitter application programming interface (API) is used to rank 264 universities using two easily collected measurements. The University Twitter Engagement (UTE) score is the total number of primary and secondary followers affiliated with the university. The authors mine other public data sources related to endowment funds, athletic expenditures and student enrollment to compute a ranking based on the endowment, expenditures and enrollment (EEE) score.

In rank-to-rank comparisons, the authors observed a significant, positive rank correlation (τ = 0.6018) between UTE and an aggregate reputation ranking, which indicates UTE could be a viable proxy for ranking atypical institutions normally excluded from traditional lists.

The UTE and EEE metrics offer distinct advantages because they can be calculated on-demand rather than relying on an annual publication and they promote diversity in the ranking lists, as any university with a Twitter account can be ranked by UTE and any university with online information about enrollment, expenditures and endowment can be given an EEE rank. The authors also propose a unique approach for discovering official university accounts by mining and correlating the profile information of Twitter friends.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH) is an evolving protocol and philosophy regarding interoperability for digital libraries (DLs). Previously, “distributed searching” models were popular for DL interoperability. However, experience has shown distributed searching systems across large numbers of DLs to be difficult to maintain in an Internet environment. The OAI‐PMH is a move away from distributed searching, focusing on the arguably simpler model of “metadata harvesting”. We detail NASA’s involvement in defining and testing the OAI‐PMH and experience to date with adapting existing NASA distributed searching DLs (such as the NASA Technical Report Server) to use the OAI‐PMH and metadata harvesting. We discuss some of the entirely new DL projects that the OAI‐PMH has made possible, such as the Technical Report Interchange Project. We explain the strategic importance of the OAI‐PMH to the mission of NASA’s Scientific and Technical Information Program.

Institutions and individuals actively engaged in research disseminate their results and experiences in a variety of ways: journals, books, technical reports, conference presentations. Books and papers submitted to journals are often restricted by the publishers’ copyright, whereas technical reports, conference proceedings and other documents are usually freely available. Documents in this second category may represent the leading edge of research, containing valuable information of interest to other researchers, but there is no widely accepted standard method for dissemination of this kind of docu ment. Often, this material is overlooked because interested parties are unaware of its existence. The Technical Reports Service of HENSA (Higher Education National Software Archive) aims to solve some of these problems. It provides a centralised access point, via the World Wide Web, to collections of relevant documents stored on FTP sites around the world. A user can perform searches over all the documents included in the service, or access an individual collection and retrieve any document of interest. Authors and document collection maintainers can easily include their documents in the service whilst maintaining total control over all the documents they make available.