Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
A lot depends on who the users are. If it is staff college students I assume they have other places to start, i.e. help from a professional librarian and directing staff.
I actually think that this is a case where a great library will pay off. First of all, even in most professionally staffed libraries, they are primarily knowledgable in academic writings, which is helpful, but does bias against things written by soldiers, and often the most that they will do is refer you to a preexisting list anyway. Secondly, and more broadly, a good library shows to the world, including those students, that this is a serious group of people who have done the scholarly research, and probably that there are things out there that are not in the scholarly domain that perhaps should be.

Now I have a question: Are you intending to have bib references, or more like .PDF files? Bib ref's are interesting, and helpful, but in a limited fashion. The problem with .PDF files is that you may not have permission to reproduce and distribute those articles, and it may be a lot of work to get permission from both the publisher and/or the author.

I suggest that if you are going to have only Bib cites that you also include files for citation managers like Refworks, EndNote, and Bibtex to make searching for those articles easier at the local library.