Link managers for grey literature

In the self service area of the library reading rooms it is required to organise the collections in the simplest way possible. This is an important feature for readers making it possible to a get direct access to the material without necessarily having to go via the library catalogue to retrieve the call number. A typical example will be that a collection is organised so that a reader easily can get directly from an article reference to the article itself in a library where the journal collection simply is organised alphabetically. This requirement seems to have been forgotten by many of the most important actors in the digital library, both by the commercial publishers and many of the bodies producing grey literature. How are the users supposed to get directly to Report XXX without having to navigate through n different web pages? This is on top happening in "The Library" which is intended to be close up to 100 based on self service! CERN Library has developed a mechanism, "Go direct", which handles the problem. So far it only processes articles published in journals, due to it's success it will however be extended to also include grey literature issued in series holding a report number. CERN Library catalogue uses "Go direct" to automatically generate links from bibliographic information to the corresponding full text of a document. The talk gives an overview over the present situation concerning link managers and URL architecture in the field of electronic publishing within high energy physics. The author proposes a standard for citing online reports based on a combined solution of the DOI system and the well established system of institutional report numbers.