For more than 50 years, AIP has interviewed and preserved the stories of outstanding physical scientists, most of them Member Society members. From 2007 to 2013 with the help of two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants, the Niels Bohr Library and Archives placed over 1,000 of the 1,500 oral history interview transcripts in our collection online. This initiative made interviews with luminaries like Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, and hundreds of others globally possible.
In 2014, our transcripts were viewed over 130,000 times and used in a variety of research projects and published works. This past year we’ve been hard at work upgrading the web pages and adding new features, thus making it easier than ever before to browse and search the transcripts. We welcome you to use the new website and to keep coming back, as more interviews continue to be added as they become available.
AIP’s new oral history home page:
- Enables visitors to efficiently browse transcript and audio excerpts, with the ability to search the full text of all transcripts
- Lists the newest available transcripts and a selection of audio excerpts
- Now integrate with the rest of the history web pages with easy access to our other collections, including the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA)
- Feature expandable tabs with background information about the transcript, including disclaimer information, preferred citation, abstract, and whether an audio excerpt is available
- Display key browsing functions, including:
- “Topics discussed in this interview”: institutions, subjects, and people mentioned in the interview, which allows users to see a list of other interviews discussing a chosen topic
- “Related images”: Up to five images from ESVA related to the interview
- Make searching and browsing the entire transcript collection easy, with prominent functions at the top/right of every page
- Gives users all the information on an interview, a photo (if available), and the beginning of the abstract. Results are shown in order of relevance.
- Allows users to filter searches using the institutions and subjects; this ability to refine searches saves time for more efficient research.
Experience how history comes alive through the words of those who have dedicated their lives to advancing the physical sciences. We invite you to spend some time perusing this resource and hope that you find it useful and inspiring. Please note with these updates the URLs for the interviews have changed, so make sure to update any bookmarks you have to them. For any questions or comments, please email the library staff.
