Contemporary (Post-WWII)

The Einstein Papers Project (EPP) publishes in large book format The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, an edition of twenty-five planned volumes of Albert Einstein's scientific, professional and personal papers, manuscripts and correspondence. Eight volumes have been published so far by Princeton University Press; two more are in preparation, to be published within the next three years. Most of the original documents in the Einstein collection are located at The Albert Einstein Archives at the Jewish National and University Library at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.

The Museum is devoted to:
Promoting an awareness of the history of computing,
Supporting research in the historiography of computing,
Providing support to teachers at all levels who are attempting to teach the history of computing.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project produces reports that explore the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life. The Project aims to be an authoritative source on the evolution of the Internet through collection of data and analysis of real-world developments as they affect the virtual world.

The Web site was constructed by staff in The Bancroft Library and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Its core resources draw on the Library's extensive collections of archives and oral histories, as well as resources created by and for the landmark symposium "Biotechnology at 25: Perspectives on History, Science, and Society" held on campus 12-13 March 1999 to celebrate the discovery of gene-cloning technology (recombinant DNA).

Our first phase of development was completed in October 1999; it was a prototype including a sample of available resources and a fully indexed streaming video of one of the Symposium participants, Stanley N. Cohen. We are seeking funding to enrich the prototype with high quality indexed video and audio files representing a broad selection of scientists and others who participated in the Symposium or are represented in the archival and oral history collections of the Library.

We will continue to build the Web site as we acquire and process materials, with a goal of providing a unique collection of primary materials for scholars in secondary and higher education and for the general public.

This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.

This "experimental history project" so to speak, is part of a program supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to explore the possibilities of using the internet to increase the collection of archival material in the history of recent science to supplement and complement expensive and time consuming oral history interviews and preparation of autobiographical memoirs. This site includes three projects devoted to topics in microbiology being developed and maintained through a grant to the American Society for Microbiology. Parallel projects are being developed by the Society for Neuroscience and the American Society for Virology.

Throughout the forty years of the study it was periodically reivewed by U.S. Health Service officials. In each case the study was extended based on the argument that stopping the study, while helping these individuals, would interfere with the benefits to medical science of studying this untreated disease (Jones, 1989). For a justification of the study by one of the researchers, see the following movie. The study was stopped by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare only after its existence was leaked to the public and it became a political embarrassment.

A novel experiment is currently underway in the geophysical sciences. Thanks to funding from the Sloan Foundation, geoscientists who have worked on a number of pathbreaking developments now have an opportunity to document and write their own history. The AGU, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Institute of Physics have established sites on the World Wide Web to which geoscientists may contribute their recollections and other unpublished material for the histories of Solar Variability and Climate Change; Black Smokers; Greenland Ice Drilling Projects; General Atmospheric Circulation Models; and the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment.

Unraveling past climate conditions by drilling through kilometers of ice is surely one of our era's grand accomplishments. Future generations will want to study how it was done but they will fail unless the participants act now to secure a high-quality historical record. Around 1999 three leading scientific organizations, the American Meteorological Society (GATE project history), the American Geophysical Union (solar variability history), and the American Institute of Physics (Center for History of Physics), with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, formed a consortium to experiment with using the World Wide Web to locate, create, and preserve historical documentation in science and technology. The aim was to find ways to establish low-cost mechanisms for gathering much historical information that would otherwise be lost to posterity. A continuation of this effort is the History of Recent Science and Technology Project.