Cornell University
Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library

NCSTRL (pronounced "ancestral") is an international collection of computer science research reports and other materials made available for non-commercial use from over 100 participating organizations worldwide. By and large these organizations are Ph.D. granting computer science departments, ePrint repositories, electronic journals, and research laboratories. The NCSTRL collection is continually growing as new institutions become participants and as existing institutions add new documents. Documents in the NCSTRL collections are almost all textual ranging in size from 100-plus page doctoral dissertations to short technical reports.

NCSTRL is a federated digital library; content, and services that provide access to the content, are distributed over sites in North America, Europe and Asia. Interaction between services and access to documents is via the Dienst protocol, an open service-based protocol for distributed digital libraries. This protocol, and a reference implementation server that implements it, was initially developed as part of the DARPA-sponsored CS-TR project.

At this date (December 1998) the NCSTRL collection consists of almost 30,000 documents. It should be noted that a "document" in Dienst (the protocol used in NCSTRL) is an abstraction that provides for disseminations in multiple formats and partitions (physical pages and logical sections). Thus, an individual document may be available in formats such as PostScript, HTML, PDF, scanned images, and GIFs. The Dienst protocol contains a service request to query the formats in which a document is available and another service request to request a specific dissemination of a document.

Each organization involved in NCSTRL defines its own access restrictions. Information on access restrictions is available per document via a Dienst protocol request.

Further information

For further information about this testbed, see: http://www.ncstrl.org/.

Researchers who wish to make use of this testbed should contact: [email protected] at Cornell University.

Point of Contact for D-Lib Test Suite Larry Lannom
last modified 5/7/00 LL/bw