Wide Area Technical Report Service

This is the final report for NSF grant NSF-CDA-9308259 on a Wide Area Technical Report Service (WATERS). WATERS provides a distributed database of technical reports and similar documents that are produced by academic departments of computer science and by research laboratories. The WATERS project aims to speed-up and increase sharing of information in the computer science field and to encourage technology transfer. By providing browse and search capability, as well as online access to technical reports, anyone with access to the Internet can have immediate access to the latest research results in the discipline. This technology enables departments with technical report series to disseminate them while simultaneously lowering costs, increasing efficiency, and increasing access. They can provide abstract and bibliographic information, and if desired the online reports. Now that the majority of new Ph.D.''S in computer science are no longer being employed at traditional research universities, this service can provide important access to young researchers who would be otherwise isolated from the global research community.