Difficult to document: The history of physics and allied fields in industrial and government labs

Journal of Archival Organization

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 7-21

  Anderson, R Joseph ^a  

^a AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS   (United States)

Author keywords

Center for history of physics; Documentation strategy; History of physics; History of science; Industrial research and development; Multi institutional collaboration

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749118023     PISSN: 15332748     EISSN: 15332756     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1300/J201v03n01_02     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Understanding Progress as Process (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1983), the final report of the Joint Committee on Archives of Science and Technology (JCAST), recommended documentation research as a means of addressing the problems inherent in documenting modern science and technology. Joan Warnow-Blewett, chair of JCAST and then associate director of the Center for History of Physics, and others subsequently developed and expanded the Committee's recommendations in papers on documentation research and documentation strategies. The Center for History of Physics is a division of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), which is an umbrella organization representing the ten largest American professional societies in physics, astronomy, geophysics, and related fields. The AIP History Center's role is to serve as a discipline center for the fields covered by AIP, to act as the archives for the Institute and its Member Societies, and to provide advice and support to other science organizations in preserving their historically valuable records and papers in physics and allied sciences.
2. In his 1974 presidential address to the Society of American Archivists, F. Gerald Ham voiced a rejection of traditional archival collecting efforts as inadequate and presented a challenge for new approaches that other archivists took up in a growing literature on collecting and appraisal models. See Ham, "The Archival Edge," American Archivist 38 (1975), 5-13.
3. Faye Phillips, "Developing Collecting Policies for Manuscript Collections," American Archivist 47, no. 1 (1984) provides a review of the literature on collecting through the mid 1980s.
4. An example of the then current literature is the author's "Managing Change and Chance: Collecting Policies in Social History Archives," American Archivist 48, no. 3 (1985).
5. The three articles that introduced the documentation strategy model are Helen W. Samuels, "Who Controls the Past?," American Archivist 49, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 109-124
6. Philip N. Alexander and Helen W. Samuels, "The Roots of 128; A Hypothetical Documentation Strategy," American Archivist 50, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 518-531
7. and Larry J. Hackman and Joan Warnow-Blewett, "The Documentation Strategy Process: A Model and a Case Study," American Archivist 50 (Winter 1987): 12-47.
8. Subsequent articles were initially strongly supportive of the model, but the literature became more mixed as documentation strategies were applied to broader areas of history. For a recent review of the documentation strategy literature, both pro and con, see George D. Oberle III, "Documenting an Idea: An Introductory Analysis of the Literature on Documentation Strategy," unpublished research paper prepared for a course entitled, "Documentation, Collection, and Appraisal of Records," (LSBC 785), University of Maryland, 2002.
9. Warnow-Blewett was on the staff of AIP Center for History of Physics from 1965 until her retirement in 1997 and was the Center's associate director from 1974 to 1997. In addition to helping to formulate the documentation strategy concept, she was primarily responsible for its development and implementation at the History Center and has published extensively on documentation research. See for example, "Documenting Recent Science: Progress and Needs," Osiris, 7 (1992): 267-298.
10. Alexander and Samuels, 519
11. Hackman and Blewett, 31-34.
12. Preface to "Constructing Knowledge in the History of Science," ed. by Arnold Thackray, Osiris 10 (1995): Vii.
13. George T. Mazuzan, The National Science Foundation: A Brief History (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation Publication nsf8816, 1988): 11.
14. Sources for History of Quantum Physics (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967). An updated description of the collection and the depository libraries is available at http://www.amphilsoc.org/ library/guides/ahqp/.
15. "The Conference on Science Manuscripts," Isis 53, part 1, no. 171 (1962). See especially remarks of Ernst Posner in a discussion session, 50-51
16. and Luther Evans, "Some Proposals for Action," 101-105.
17. The reports produced by the DOE study listed below are available free from the AIP History Center: Joan Warnow et al, A Study of Preservation of Documents at Department of Energy Laboratories, 33 pp., January 1982.
18. Joan Warnow and the AIP Advisory Committee on the Documentation of Postwar Science, Guidelines for Records Appraisal at Major Research Facilities; Selection of Permanent Records of DOE Laboratories: Institutional Management and Policy, and Physics Research, 31 pp., 1982, revised 1985.
19. Jane Wolff, Files Maintenance and Records Disposition: A Handbook for Secretaries at Department of Energy Laboratories, 21 pp., 1982, revised 1985.
20. The AIP Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations published reports at the completion of each phase of the study: Phase I: High Energy Physics, 4 reports, 1993
21. Phase II: Space Science and Geophysics, 2 reports, 1995
22. and Phase III: Ground-Based Astronomy, Materials Science, Heavy-Ion and Nuclear Physics, Medical Physics, and Computer-Mediated Collaborations, 2 reports, 1999.
23. In addition, final reports consisting of Highlights and Project Recommendations and the more complete Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations were published in 2001. All but one of the reports are available online at http://www.aip.org/history/pubslst.htm#collabs and are also available free in paper. The other report is a now outdated inventory of collections; current information on collections is available in the International Catalog of Sources.
24. For one example, see Jean Marie Deken, "Future Proof for Physics: Preserving the Record of SLAC," in Journal of Archival Organization 3, no. 1 (2005): 23-35.
25. Elizabeth W. Adkins, "The Development of Business Archives in the United States: An Overview and a Personal Perspective," American Archivist 60, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 10-11
26. Francis X. Blouin, Jr., introduction to James O'Toole, ed., The Records of American Business (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997): 1.
27. Bruce H. Bruemmer and Sheldon Hochheiser, The High-Technology Company; A Historical Research and Archival Guide (Charles Babbage Institute, 1989): 1-6, point out that "the inadequacy of information about business, its structure, and its documentation is a common theme in recent archival literature ..." and add that "the large, high-technology company is among the most difficult of institutions to document."
28. Michael S. Moss and Lesley M. Richmond, "Business Records: The Prospect from the Global Village," in James M. O'Toole, ed., The Records of American Business (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997): 369-390
29. and Henrik Fode and Jørgen Fink, "The Business Records of a Nation: The Case of Denmark," American Archivist 60 (Winter 1997): 72-86.
30. The companies are IBM, Xerox, Lucent Technologies, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Honeywell, Eastman Kodak, Corning, General Atomics, 3M, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Texas Instruments. These fifteen firms were selected from the twenty-seven companies identified as the leading corporate employers of physicists in the past three AIP Education and Employment Statistics Division's biannual surveys of the ten AIP Member Societies.
31. A former Bell Labs (Lucent Technologies) director reported that Schön's fabricated publications had gone undetected initially in part because the once "ubiquitous lab notebook" system that had been used to document laboratory research had apparently been "forgotten or abandoned." See Barbara Goss Levi, "Investigation Finds that One Lucent Physicist Engaged in Scientific Misconduct," Physics Today 55, no. 11 (2002): 17.