Technical reports are a means of communicating the progress of research in fields of technology and science; they are used to communicate information for technical development throughout industry and throughout research institutions contributing to the continued development and growth of science and technology. These reports are highly detailed and contain valuable information serving specialized audiences of researchers. While availability and access to more recent (1994-current) technical report literature has greatly improved with delivery via the Internet, legacy technical report documents remain elusive to researchers.   Most large research libraries across the country have sizeable collections of federally funded technical research reports—frequently a million or more reports ranging from several pages to several hundred pages.  However, these collections, particularly legacy collections, are often difficult to identify and locate for several reasons:

• Dissemination to libraries has occurred through a variety of agencies and organizations over many years; dissemination was often based on institution profiles creating incomplete sets of reports. 
• There is limited bibliographic access and control in Science, Technology & Medicine indexing sources and often more than one index must be consulted to retrieve a report.
• Collections are usually available in some combination of print and/or microfiche and are difficult to access without known citations and mediation to navigate through the various collections and organization strategies.
• Depending on institution preferences and availability some collections of reports were produced and distributed using poor quality media resulting in disintegrating and unusable pieces of collections at many institutions.
• Most library catalogs and bibliographic utilities only include access points at a broad series level and even fewer records for individual technical reports in their online cataloging systems making it difficult for users to determine the availability of reports in local library collections. 
• Most legacy reports are not accessible in electronic format and are difficult to acquire via Interlibrary Loan, compounding the difficulties experienced by end users in accessing the research reports.