Preserving Scientific Source Materials: A Guide for Owners

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1 1 de :25 NCUACS homepage : Preserving Scientific Source Materials: A Guide for Owners This guide is addressed primarily to those who, on retirement, believe that their papers should be preserved, and to the families of those who have died. It also aims at helping those who, on changing their jobs or interests, wish to reduce the bulk of their files, or those who, on retiring from continuous professional activities, wish to retain the material in their possession but reduce its size. INTRODUCTION This guide has been compiled in answer to requests from British scientists, their families and colleagues. Its aim is to assist people who find themselves faced with large and miscellaneous accumulations of material, and who are at a loss to decide what, if anything, should be retained. This situation most often arises after a death, at retirement or on removal to a smaller house; but it may happen on appointment overseas or to some relatively distant university/laboratory/institute, or when there is a marked change in research interests; sometimes, too, a specific project or period of service to a professional association or journal, advisory commission or enquiry, may come to an end. On all these occasions, a more or less drastic clearing-up takes place and material may be at risk. The guide hopes to minimise the risk. Some scientists take the view that only published papers matter, that science is always moving forward, and that there is no point in preserving the background material such as early ideas and theories, sketches for series of experiments, apparatus or equipment, or, on a wider contextual scale, ideas for funding research or collaborating with colleagues. Documentation of this kind, often considered merely 'outdated' or 'finished with', may become valuable source materials for the historian and should be preserved. Although this guide attempts to give some initial help, it cannot offer a permanent solution. If you consider that some, or all, of your papers contain material likely to be of permanent interest, you may wish to make arrangements to offer them to a library or archive. This may be in a university or institution with which you have been closely associated, or a learned society (though most of these have little space available); or it may be your local Record Office, or if the records originate in government work, The National Archives. Whichever is the appropriate choice the archivist will usually be pleased to co-operate with a prospective donor and to suggest any relevant methods and procedures. He or she may also ask permission to select material from a large collection that cannot be housed in toto. If you wish to retain some papers in family hands, you may want to arrange for a set of photocopies to be made. It is then preferable for the originals to be deposited with the archive collection where they can be given professional care. From an archival perspective photocopies are less satisfactory than originals and provide the scholar with less information, but they can help to minimise the danger of splitting up a collection.

2 2 de :25 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 'History' takes many forms: history of technical discoveries, of scientific thought, of education and the diffusion of ideas, of political, economic and social development, of scientific funding, of military techniques and many others. Thus, any initial sorting of scientific papers should be essentially conservative, especially if any discarding is contemplated, with rearrangements and editing kept to a minimum. Any collection of 'personal' papers will in fact include much of general interest, in the form of contacts with other institutions, members of the scientific community of older and younger generations and internationally. Your collection may be a useful source of information in unexpected byways. Keep all correspondence until advised otherwise. Sorting and indexing are best left to a professional archivist. Undated and unidentified notes and letters are an irritation and can become a source of error and controversy. If you can provide information, please do so. This is best done in the form of a note, preferably signed or initialled by yourself, attached with a plastic or brass clip to the document, expanding first-name or illegible signatures, or initials or adding a date e.g. 'April 1952' or 'probably September 1961'. Photographs are in a similar category. Intrinsically of great interest, they are almost useless, and very time-consuming, if unidentified. It is probably best in these cases to make a pencil note or attach a gummed label on the back in order to avoid damaging the surface by using a clip. Names and dates, place or occasion should be given if possible. Do avoid attempts to repair damaged documents. The use of self-adhesive tape, such as sellotape, is highly damaging as it causes chemical reactions to paper. CONFIDENTIAL OR SENSITIVE MATERIAL All collections of private papers include such material. It may be personal to the donor or this family; it may refer to a third party; it may be semi-official material generated by an outside body. In the long term, it is likely to be of considerable interest in building up the history of a discovery, an individual or an institution. Owners of such material are often uncomfortable and worried about it. They need not be so. Archivists are well accustomed to handling papers of this kind with discretion; they have excellent security arrangements and are usually prepared for a donor to place documents under restricted access. This is an area in which early contact with an archivist is particularly helpful. AN OUTLINE SYSTEM It is useful to think of papers in three main categories, whose proportions will vary greatly depending on temperament and choice of career. They are: 1. Personal life, 2. Professional life, 3. Public life.

3 3 de :25 1. Personal life Try to keep enough material to enable a clear biographical 'profile' to emerge. It may include: Records of school and university career Letters of application and appointment Testimonials and references. These will often have been from distinguished figures of an earlier generation and have historical interest in their own right. Invitations to accept honours, undertake lecture tours, serve on advisory panels etc. A list of honours, awards, degrees (kept up to date) Any special features. Many leading figures have overcome handicaps such as deafness, stammering, war wounds, family difficulties. Any special personal skills, interests (music, sport, writing poetry or fiction) or beliefs (religion, politics, pacifism). War Service. Letters of congratulation or condolence. These may seem trivial but often include interesting recollections, and usually show the overlap of earlier, contemporary and later generations. Personal and family correspondence. 2. Professional life This means your contribution to science and the scientific community, whether as learner, teacher, researcher, director of an institute or department, writer, editor, lecturer, conference organiser or speaker. It is likely to be the largest of the three categories, and certainly that in which you can be most helpful in identifying material. Material may include: Notes of lectures by others, perhaps university courses by distinguished scientists or those who particularly influenced you. Research notes, laboratory notebooks, diaries, expedition journals, drawings (identified wherever possible) documenting your career or research interests. Publications. A list or set of publications (kept up to date). Drafts or notes for crucial papers, perhaps with comments by colleagues, corrections, referees' reports. Talks, lectures, addresses. These include university courses, invitation lectures in Britain or abroad, in-house discussions or seminars, inaugural addresses etc. They should be retained unless they already feature in the set of publications. Conferences. Your own notes on papers read, photographs or films of colleagues (identified wherever possible), programmes, lists of participants. Some special 'one-off' conferences or short-lived projects may have no central record-keeping agency, so be especially conservative. Learned societies, associations, journals. Keep all material relating to the founding, financing and organisation of societies and their journals, and to any special meetings, anniversary celebrations etc. in which you were personally involved. Departmental and administrative material. Grant applications, building plans, sketches for new equipment, staffing and budgeting. Non-text materials (photographs, slides, audio and videotape, specimens). 3. Public life

4 4 de :25 Scientific research cannot be isolated from the community at large. This factor is of particular importance in the history of twentieth century science and should be borne in mind when deciding what papers should be retained. There is some obvious overlap with 2 above. The main difference will be the less technical nature of the work, and its involvement with a wider public. Material may include: Service on committees, government advisory boards and research councils, Royal or specialist commissions Service on university or inter-university committees Service to international organisations, developing countries etc. Industrial or commercial, visits to and reports on laboratories and research projects Political activities in Britain or overseas Broadcasts and television appearances References and testimonials for individuals, publications, research projects Electronic records Although this Guide refers to papers, electronic records are a vital and ever-increasing part of modern documentation. When you are assessing your archives you should not overlook the records created and stored on your computer, whether they are word-processed documents such as drafts of lectures or copies of letters, s, web pages, databases or dynamic programs. At the moment there is no single generally accepted strategy for the long-term preservation of and access to electronic records in personal archives. The same solution is not necessarily applicable to all. However, there is a comprehensive set of recommendations for ongoing creation and preservation of your electronic records at /guidanceforcreators/guidance-for-creators-of-personal-digital-archives.pdf For those who are not in the position to adopt such a comprehensive approach and are simply interested in how best to transfer electronic documents to archivists, our current advice is that electronic documents such as s, correspondence, lecture drafts etc, should either be printed out and if necessary identified and dated, or transferred to a suitable interim storage medium (floppy disk, CD, DVD, USB Memory Key etc) and identified with folder and/or file names, the subject matter of the data, the operating system and software (and, if applicable, hardware) used, file size, and the dates of creation of the original and the transfer of the document onto disk. Material that cannot be printed out without losing significant contextual information (such as webpages, relational databases, for example) should be transferred to disk, CD, DVD or Memory Key and identified with folder and/or file names, the subject matter of the data, the operating system and software (and, if applicable, hardware) used, file size, and the dates of creation and transfer of the document. Entire directories of material on a computer (for example, saved s on a particular subject, letters to a particular correspondent) should be transferred to disk, CD, DVD or Memory Key and identified with the directory name, subject matter, the operating system and software (and, if applicable, hardware) used, directory size, the dates of creation and transfer of the document. It would also be useful if you could identify any sensitive material.

5 5 de :25 You may feel it is simpler to include your computer as part of the archive rather than try to save the individual folders and files to storage media, or there may be records that are not easily transferable. If so please remember to ensure the archivists have any passwords necessary to access your computer records! Please note. If you are using CDs and DVDs for long-term storage of records, if possible please use branded makes rather than cheaper alternatives. Also please try to avoid reusing CD-RWs and DVD-RWs for your data. Reused RW disks are not at present reliable enough to be archivally sound. Please store CDs and DVDs upright rather than horizontally. CAN ANYTHING BE DISCARDED? The general keynote is conservation. Nevertheless, some material can be discarded. It would include: Multiple copies of publications and other printed papers. Clean galley proofs of publications Travel documents and arrangements (unless associated with some special event such as involvement with visa difficulties, revolutions, road accidents etc.) Multiple copies of committee minutes and circulars (unless heavily annotated chairman's copies etc.). Multiple copies of University, learned society, professional association minutes and circulars, examination papers. Complimentary offprints by others. These constitute a special problem on which it is difficult to advise. They should be retained if they are 'association' or signed copies of obvious historical or personal interest, if they are annotated copies which form an essential part of a research project, if they emanate from a relatively recondite source (perhaps foreign or ephemeral) unlikely to be readily available elsewhere in this country, or if they are part of a coherent collection specially assembled to provide a tour d'horizon of knowledge in a particular field or at a particular time. OTHER SOURCES OF INFORMATION OR ADVICE The National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists will be pleased to help by letter or if necessary by a visit. Information on places of deposit in England and Wales may be sought from the Historical Manuscripts Commission at The National Archives, Ruskin Avenue, Kew, Surrey TW9 4DU. The Commission is responsible for the National Register of Archives In the case of Scotland, information should be sought from the National Archives of Scotland, H.M. General Register House, Edinburgh EH1 3YY and for Northern Ireland, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 66 Balmoral Avenue, Belfast BT9 6NY Last updated 25 November T.E.Powell@bath.ac.uk