Joan Warnow-Blewett

Joan Warnow-Blewett was a key staff member of the AIP Center for History of Physics for 32 years. She joined AIP in 1965 as Librarian of the Niels Bohr Library; in 1974 she was promoted to Associate Director of the Center.

In January 1965, when Joan came to work at the Niels Bohr Library, the AIP Center for History of Physics had not yet been founded. She pioneered the "documentation strategy" approach to preservation by working cooperatively with archivists to save papers of individual physicists, whenever possible at their home institutions. The strategy had to evolve to cope with the challenges of documenting the new institutions of the postwar physics community. To meet the need Joan initiated documentation research projects, in which archivists were joined by historians, sociologists, and scientists to study from an archival perspective such institutions as the postwar national laboratory and the multi-institutional collaboration. Under Joan's innovative leadership, the AIP received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of American Archivists in 1985. Joan was named a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1990.

Another component of Joan's responsibility was the National Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences. As the Center's historical projects and preservation work expanded, so did the Catalog. Eventually its name was changed from "National" to "International" Catalog. Joan's major innovation was to persuade institutions outside the United States to conduct surveys to locate relevant collections in their countries and share the information with the International Catalog.

Joan's educational projects included "Moments of Discovery" and three major exhibits: the Einstein Centennial Exhibit, Physics in 1922 (for the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics), and the George Ellery Hale Centennial Exhibit.

Joan enjoys telling how she came to the American Institute of Physics through an advertisement in the New York Times that, fortunately, didn't mention physics or science. (She had a degree in Library Service and graduate studies in literature, but had steered clear of the sciences!) She also likes to say that in order to save and care for papers of scientists, archivists don't have to marry a physicist--as she did with the eminent accelerator physicist John P. Blewett.

Joan retired full-time (in North Carolina) in 1998.

In 2005 she married the noted historian of physics Martin Klein. She died May 30, 2006