The Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics is launching a $600 000, three-year project designed to create a national documentation strategy for identifying and saving records of physicists who work in industry. The idea for the project grew out of earlier efforts that created documentation strategies for government contract laboratories and multi-institutional research collaborations, said Joe Anderson, associate director of the history center.
The task may prove daunting because, although European industries have a long tradition of archiving documents, very few American corporations maintain in-house archives to document their own R&D, Anderson said. A background document for the project noted that “American archivists lack both the financial resources and conceptual framework to preserve the history of industrial R&D. The resulting dearth of significant and readily accessible documentary sources has limited the ability of historians, policymakers, and other scholars to explore in detail one of the...
