You might like to check out:
http://www.vifp.monash.edu.au/techreports/sitelist.html
It is the first run at converting my technical reports archive list
(posted regularly to comp.doc.techreports, news.answers, etc) to html.
It's also available as a WAIS database (cs-techreport-archives).
Ideally, I'd like to maintain it in html, and convert it to text for
posting, but I never seem to get enough time. It contains about 140
ftp sites that I've collected that appear to archive technical
reports.
I also maintain a WAIS database of abstracts from technical reports
(cs-techreport-abstracts). The format I use is being used now by
several sites, so they can get their data into the database very
quickly (daily automatic checks). The rest of the abstracts I have
either formatted manually, or written a perl script to convert (where
the conversion looks like it will be useful in the future), with more
and more of a leaning towards writing scripts (who cares if I've got 40
scripts lying around, and never used again? Besides, I'm a
Perlaholic :-). For information on the format, see:
ftp://daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au/pub/techreports/sites/README
and on the whole project in:
ftp://daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au/pub/techreports/README
The database contains nearly 7000 reports, with over 2000 abstracts
from about 70 universities and research organisations.
My grand plan has been to have the entire database searchable,
returning a group of abstracts, with a hypertext link to the paper
itself, or if it's not available via ftp, a "mailto:" that will allow
the "contact" for that paper to be emailed a request for the paper.
This will all be done in W3, I've been converted :-)
I can see some common stuff here, so perhaps we could talk about
combining our efforts Marc (in private email, of course).
have fun,
rik.
-- Rik Harris - rik.harris@fcit.monash.edu.au +61 3 560-3265 (AH & ans.mach) +61 3 565-3227 (BH) Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Clayton Campus, Monash University, Australia