Behind the scenes of the digital museum of information retrieval research

As more and more of the world becomes digital, and documents become easily available over the Internet, we are suddenly able to access all kinds of information. The downside of this however is that information that is not digital becomes less accessed, and is liable to be lost to us and to future generations. Whereas there are many scanning projects underway, such as Google books and the Open Library Alliance, these projects are not going to know about, much less find, the specialized scientific literature within various fields. This short paper describes the beginnings of a project to digitize some of the older literature in the information retrieval field. The paper finishes with some thoughts for future work on making more of our IR literature available for searching