2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper describes how software tools were utilized to aid in cataloging works issued as part of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) depository program. From the mid-1940s to mid-1970s. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission operated a depository program with selected libraries. The program distributed technical information related to atomic energy via several formats and receiving libraries were tasked with making these materials available to the public. While there was some overlap with AEC material distributed via the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), the majority of items – hundreds of thousands of titles – were distributed only via the AEC depository program. These collections remain largely invisible primarily due to the lack of cataloging. Historically, many libraries chose not to add technical reports to their catalogs and most of those collections remain outside of the library’s online catalogs to this day. This lack of visibility makes these technical reports hard to locate, which reduces their use and concomitantly their value to the institution. While it is tempting to save space by discarding these low-use collections, the availability of online repositories such as OSTI.GOV and NTRL.NTIS.GOV are not always acceptable surrogates for having physical copies. In the first place, everything in these repositories is not fully digitized. Secondly, digitized versions are not always of sufficient quality nor are they always complete and access to original or alternate versions is required. Finally, online repositories sometimes go down (or are taken down) so, using the LOCKSS principle, having access to other copies is valuable.

In recent years, some progress has been made in addressing the cataloging challenge of technical reports generally and specifically the AEC materials. The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL) program has begun to scan and catalog the portion of the AEC depository collection issued as microopaques, around 60,000 titles. Unfortunately, the bulk of the collection was issued on microfiche and most have yet to be cataloged in any way.

Penn State University participated in the AEC depository program for most of its existence and amassed a very large collection of reports, which are now being cataloged. In support of the work of the TRAIL project, Penn State focused its initial efforts on cataloging the small microfiche and microopaques. Following completion of the smaller formats, cataloging commenced on the remaining microfiche which consists of approximately 200,000 titles. Materials issued in print format had already been cataloged, though not identified as being issued as part of the AEC depository program. Given the large number of reports to be cataloged, automation was employed to speed up some of the cataloging processes. Programs used included Microsoft’s Power Automate and Excel, Java programming, and MarcEdit. Utilization of these tools greatly increased the speed of processing of the collection and illustrates how basic programming tools can help to address long-standing library backlogs.