Technical Reports
Technical reports describe research, development, and engineering advances related to technology. Unlike technical articles found in journals, they are not subject to a refereeing process before publication.
National Technical Information Service (NTIS) Publications
The largest collection of technical reports at the State Library comes from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It includes reports on the results of U.S. and foreign government-sponsored research and development activities. The Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are among the major Federal agencies producing the reports, and numerous other U.S. agencies, universities and other centers of research are represented. Most major foreign governments are now contributing technical reports to this vast database.
NTIS now indexes and makes available more than 66,000 publications annually, most of them technical reports. (The non-report literature consists chiefly of data files on disks or tapes, and software programs.) Not all of the information is technical; the social sciences are also represented.
The collection excludes foreign language reports except for energy reports which were acquired from 1988 to the present.
Depository Collections
The Library is a depository for NASA publications, receiving them directly instead of from NTIS.
The work done under the aegis of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the U.S. Department of Energy, is documented in thousands of reports, and the Library is a depository for these collections.
The Library, as a U.S. Government Printing Office regional depository, receives many technical reports produced by Federal agencies.
The General Electric Company has placed on deposit at the Library a retrospective collection of its Class 1 CRD (Corporate Research and Development) Reports.
Other states, and other countries, such as Canada, regularly provide technical reports to the Library.
Other Report Collections
The reports of the Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers are held.
The Declassified Documents Reference System provides thousands of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, Departments of State and Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Presidential Libraries and National Archives, many containing technical information.