[My apologies if this is a repost. The original was posted a a couple of days ago via a news gateway which may or may not have actually worked.] I was trying to dig up some cryptography papers cited as references today, when a thought hit me; there seem to be a fair amount of crypto papers available on the Net, but they're pretty scattered. Bell Labs has some online, which is great! The cypherpunks FTP archive has a few, though you can't perform keyword searches against them. In short, it's hard to find papers unless you already know what you want and where it might be. Having had some experience in designing and implementing technical report retrieval services, I naturally think there's room for improvement here. 8-) What I have in mind is something like NASA's NTRS ("NASA Technical Report Server", <http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/NTRS>), which I helped design and implement at my last job. The basic idea behind NTRS is that users submit a query to a sort of "search multiplexer" which queries a list of selected databases, merges the separate result sets and gives them back to the user. The results are typically bibliographic and abstract data about papers, which contain links to the papers themselves if they are available online, or ordering info if they're not. From past experience, I think this model could be applied here very successfully. One way to accomplish this would be to establish an archive where people could submit papers to be indexed. Larger institutions (such as Bell Labs) might run their own servers, so they would have control of their own content but could still be searched via the multiplexer. Users of the service could then search all the different archives they were interested in with one simple query. Anyway, this is what I'd like to see. I'm willing to work on such a system if there's enough positive feedback. Does anyone else think they'd like to use or contribute to such a system? -- ========================================================================== David J. Bianco | Web Wonders, Online Oddities, Cool Stuff iTribe, Inc. | Suite 1700, World Trade Center | email: <bianco@itribe.net> Norfolk, VA 23510 | URL : http://www.itribe.net/~bianco/