February 2007

NASA's NACA Reports Server and the new NTRS interface

In October 2006, NASA shutdown their NACA Reports Server. NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) was NASA's predecessor. The agency was founded on 3rd March 1915 and existed until the end of September 1958, when NASA came into being.

During its existence, NACA produced thousands of (technical) reports, many of which still have relevance to today's researchers and engineers in aeronautics and aerodynamics. While many of the reports are only available in hardcopy, in the last decade or so, a substantial number of the reports - over 14,000 - have been digitised and made available online.

The good news is that these digitised reports are still available despite the demise of the NACA Reports Server. They can now be accessed from the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS).

According to the NTRS:

"The NTRS offers users a single interface for searching the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) reports, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reports and videos, and the NASA Image eXchange (NIX) images/photos and movies/videos. The new NTRS allows term searching, i.e., searching by user provided terms and navigation searching, i.e., searching by a category such as subject or NASA Center." (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/index.jsp?method=latest)

Of course, in addition to the NTRS, over 7,000 of the digitised NACA reports can still be searched and downloaded from the UK archive of digitised NACA reports and also from the AERADE Reports Archive, which also holds over 3,000 digitised Aeronautical Reports Council technical reports.

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