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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.

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.