Joan Warnow-Blewett
Joel Genuth
Spencer R. Weart
PART B: APPRAISAL
OF RECORDS CREATED
PART C: CURRENT
ARCHIVAL PRACTICES AND PROJECT RECOMMENDATIONS
INTRODUCTION
[Back To Top] [Part A] [Part
B] [Part C]
The American Institute of Physics
Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations was launched in 1989 and completed
this year. The study was initiated by the AIP Center for History of Physics
because of the increasing importance of large-scale research projects and the
many unknowns and complexities of documenting them. This is the first systematic
examination of the organizational structures and functions of multi-institutional
collaborations. We covered research projects involving three or more institutions
in physics and related fields: high-energy physics (Phase I), space science
and geophysics (Phase II), and ground-based astronomy, heavy-ion and nuclear
physics, materials science, and medical physics (Phase III). For each discipline
under study we had a Working Group of historians, archivists, sociologists,
and—most important of all —distinguished scientists and science administrators.
Our last Working Group reviewed and updated the contents of our final report.
Throughout the AIP Study, our field work consisted on the one hand of structured
interviews with over 450 scientists who participated in nearly 60 collaborations
selected to serve as our case studies, and on the other hand, of site visits
to numerous archival and records management programs. The interviews provided
data on organizational patterns, records creation and use, and the likely locations
of valuable documentation. The archival site visits—to academia, federal
science agencies, the National Archives, and elsewhere—provided data on
existing records policies and practices and the likelihood of collaborations
being documented under current conditions. Reports published at the end of each
phase of the study are available on request from the AIP Center; summary reports
are on the Center's Web site.
The AIP Study concludes with the publication of its final report covering all phases of the study and including, as far as possible, recent trends. The report has two constituent parts: Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations, the full report, and Highlights and Project Recommendations, which is the report in hand.
It is important to note that these Highlights consist of a selection of excerpts from the full report rather than a summary of it.
Highlights follows the organization in three parts of the full report; the excerpts for each section typically focus on one discipline in order to illustrate the varied coverage and the in-depth work of the AIP Study. Part A, Findings, has two sections: Historical-Sociological Findings and Archival Findings. Our excerpts in the former are taken from the fields of ground-based astronomy and space science; in the latter, the excerpts illustrate archival findings in each field covered by the AIP Study. Part B, Appraisal of Records Created, consists of three sections. In Section One, Typology, our excerpts focus on the discipline of particle and nuclear physics; Section Two, Functional Analysis, concentrates on geophysics; and excerpts in Section Three, Appraisal Guidelines, are devoted to materials science. In Part C, Current Archival Practices and Project Recommendations, the section on Current Archival Practices provides highlights from the study's findings in various sectors including academia, corporations, and federal agencies. Because of its central importance, the Project Recommendations section is reprinted in full. We refer throughout these Highlights to the relevant sections of Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations, and encourage readers to turn to that report for more complete information.
Archivists and records managers may wonder why they must take on "yet another responsibility." A different perspective would be that scientific activities are simply being shared differently than in the past—fewer scientists are doing individual or small projects and more and more of them are participating in collaborative projects.
It may be difficult for scientists—even those who direct collaborative work—to recognize the importance of saving documentary source materials. It may seem that their personal recollections and those of their colleagues are sufficient. This is unfortunate from the standpoint of present needs. From the standpoint of the future it is disastrous, for even the imperfect personal recollections will die with the scientists, and later generations will never know how some of the important scientific work of our times was done.
The long-term AIP Study of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations was funded by the AIP and by public and private foundations,
including the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Department
of Energy. Joan Warnow-Blewett and Spencer R. Weart served as project director
and associate project director throughout the AIP Study. The staff position
of project historian was held by Frederick Nebeker during Phase I and Joel Genuth
throughout Phases II and III. In the position of project archivist: Lynn Maloney
served during Phase I, Janet Linde overlapped with Maloney on Phase I and with
Anthony Capitos on Phase II, and Capitos continued as project archivist during
Phase III until April 1997, after which time Genuth assisted Warnow-Blewett
with these responsibilities. Major consultants to the AIP Study included historians
Peter Galison, John Krige, Frederick Nebeker, Naomi Oreskes, and Robert Smith;
archivists Deborah Cozort Day and Roxanne Nilan; and sociologists Wesley Shrum,
Ivan Chompalov, and, for Phases I and II, Lynne Zucker. We also want to acknowledge
the support of research assistants, notably Martha Keyes. R. Joseph Anderson,
now assistant director of the AIP Center, helped out with the work and—most
importantly—provided an objective perspective on our draft documents. Martha
Keyes and Kiera Robinson (Phase II), and Holly Russo (Phase III and Final Report)
were responsible for publication layout and production of reports; each was
assisted by Rachel Carter.
PART A: FINDINGS
[Back To Top] [Introduction]
[Part B] [Part C]
SECTION ONE: HISTORICAL-SOCIOLOGICAL FINDINGS (by Joel Genuth ) [Back To Top]
The three phases of the AIP Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations were organized around the investigation of scientific disciplines. Our expectation was that while multi-institutional projects in all fields would have similar roots in researchers' desire for more resources, nevertheless researchers in each specialty would have particular traditions and needs that would shape the character of their collaborations. We searched for a characteristic pattern within each specialty; we rarely found one. Instead, we found significant variations in collaborations within each field. Subsequent analysis of a database covering all three phases of the AIP Study bore out the conclusion that discipline-specific styles of multi-institutional collaborations do not exist (see Part B, Section One: Topology).
We found that styles of collaborating are related to aspects, such as project formation or organization and management, that are (more or less) common in all the disciplines we covered. For example, in every field we studied, the scope of collaboration involvement in data management was central to its style. Some collaborations enabled individual or groups of researchers to acquire data and then imposed few if any requirements on what the researchers did with the data. Some collaborations determined when and where their members acquired data—and thus what data their members could collect—but then imposed few if any requirements on how their members processed, analyzed, or interpreted the data they had acquired. Some collaborations controlled data acquisition and then insisted that their members share data streams and at least discuss interpretive issues that involved multiple data sets. Some collaborations required that their members reach consensus on the interpretation of data streams acquired by the collaboration prior to any dissemination of findings outside the collaboration. Finally, some collaborations did not acquire data but obtained and processed data that were individually and independently acquired.
In general, the broader a collaboration's scope and the more it collectivized the interpretation and presentation of results, the more participatory its internal governance. Because the collaboration, in these cases, controlled the factors that most influence the development of scientific careers, individual researchers and their employing institutions insisted on equal participation in collaboration affairs. The narrower a collaboration's scope and the more it limited itself to the design and construction of instrumentation, the more likely it was to grant decision-making power to individual researchers or institutions. We found that the more participatory collaborations tended to centralize their management of records more than the formal or hierarchical collaborations. Participatory self-governance was a collaboration's response to its members' interdependence in all phases of scientific work, and members required a centralized information pool in order to assess and discuss each other's contributions to their shared work. Because formal or hierarchical collaborations tended to have more restricted scopes, their members were more prone to have records that were unique to their use of the collaboration's resources.
In this Highlights report, our general
introduction is followed by excerpts from our findings in the fields of ground-based
astronomy (observatory builders) and space science.
I. INTRODUCTION
The stories of collaborations in the contemporary physical sciences constitute
a fascinating tapestry of patterned diversity. Within each scientific specialty
covered by the AIP Study, the researchers' quest for effective, feasible, and
soul-satisfying organizational frameworks for querying nature has produced variations
on classic themes. A full and definitive accounting of such frameworks was beyond
the scope of the AIP Study, whose primary objective has been to generate empirically
informed recommendations for how to document multi-institutional collaborations.
However, for our program of interviews with participants in selected collaborations—we
interviewed over 450 participants in nearly 60 collaborations to create the
empirical foundation for our recommendations—we liberally interpreted our
mandate in order to provide the materials for a first comparative assessment
of the narratives of collaborations. Within each of the areas of physical research,
we attempted to cover a range of characteristics in the collaborations we selected
for investigation. We designed the interviews to obtain insights into processes
that must be understood to begin imagining a documentation strategy and framing
a historical investigation:
The interviews thus provided at least skeletal information on the origins, organization, and legacy of each collaboration. The historical and sociological analyses of this information not only serves the cause of identifying those collaborators who were most likely to have records that document significant developments, but also can help archivists, administrators, and policy analysts to assess how collaborations generate and use records, why collaborations organize themselves in the ways they do, and why they seem more or less successful in the eyes of their participants.
There is, of course, no best way
to run a multi-institutional collaboration; there is not even a best way to
run a collaboration in most of the individual areas covered in the AIP Study.
However, there are styles of collaborating that are appropriate to particular
conditions or purposes that recur throughout the areas and the individual cases.
The more intimately inter-dependent participants in a collaboration are, the
more participatory and democratic a collaboration tends to be; particle physics
collaborations, in which instrumentation components made by individual teams
must all work well together to create meaningful data, most frequently practice
this style. At the other extreme, collaborations create fewer and less intense
inter-dependencies among scientists when their purpose is to develop and maintain
research facilities that members of participating institutions compete to use.
Such collaborations sharply distinguish "engineering" from "science,"
strive to make their facilities' engineering serviceable to many scientific
interests, and employ elaborate organizational structures to insure their divisions
of labor are suitable and that all the claimants on the facilities receive a
fair hearing. The geophysics collaborations that "import techniques"
and the ground-based astronomy collaborations that build observatories often
practice this style. In-between these extremes are various shades of gray. The
variations in how collaborations are managed, in the roles of participating
institutions, and in the dependencies of the participating scientists underpin
the archival analysis that follows this section.
. . .
III. GROUND-BASED ASTRONOMY:
OBSERVATORY BUILDERS
A. Introduction
Only universities were charter members of all of the four collaborations we
investigated, all of these collaborations have allowed only universities to
be full institutional members, and in only one of our cases did the collaboration
invent a less-than-full-member category in order to accommodate other scientific
institutions. In all cases, the bulk of the funding for the collaboration came
from university endowments and private sources. Government funding was an important
supplement to the private funding in all but one case but securing government
funding was not a pre-requisite to formalizing a collaboration and initiating
work. All the projects were ongoing at the time of interviewing; AIP interviewed
a total of 15 participants.
Our sample did not include any collaborations that involved national optical or radio observatories or that was managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which manages many of the national observatories. Our findings would likely have been different had such collaborations been included.
B. Project Formation
Aging, university-owned facilities and frustrations with the quantity and flexibility
of the time to be won by competing for the use of national observatories have
stimulated astronomers and engineers in university astronomy departments to
consider the creation of new or re-capitalized observatories. Would-be instigators
with promising ideas for a new observatory performed preliminary design studies
(sometimes with "seed" funding and sometimes on departmental time)
and convinced their departmental colleagues to be supportive. Collaborations
became necessary when the department lost confidence in its ability to raise,
on its own, sufficient funds to implement the instigators' ideas. The purpose
of collaborating, in all cases, was to find enough monetary contributions to
build the observatory.
Observatory-instigators used the
scientific capabilities of national observatories as the context in which to
argue for their plans. The collaborations we studied had all succeeded in identifying
an appealing combination of features that partially distinguished them from
national observatories and partially emulated national observatories. Lower
estimated construction costs were the most common and obvious way for collaborations
to distinguish themselves in an appealing way from national observatories, but
lower costs were neither necessary nor sufficient to forming an observatory-building
collaboration. In one case, a collaboration raised funds comparable to the construction
costs of a national observatory on the promise of building an observatory that
outperformed national observatories employing the same basic techniques. In
the three cases in which the collaborations raised significantly less money
than needed for a national observatory, they did not simply build lesser versions
of national observatories but focused resources so as to match or outperform
some of the capabilities of the national observatories. One collaboration accepted
having less across-the-board observing power, but developed remote-user capabilities
that enabled astronomers to carry out a wide range of schedules. (For example,
one astronomer, to good effect, observed the same quasar for twenty minutes
every other night for months on end. The astronomer could not have carried out
such a program at a national observatory and discharged his other responsibilities).
Another collaboration accepted having less angular observing range than has
been typical, but sought at least to match the observing power of the world's
best telescopes within its observing range. Another built a smaller-than-national
observatory that covered a frequency range for which there was no dedicated
national observatory.
. . .
C. Organization and Management
Historically, astronomy has long been a "big science" in the sense
of needing expensive facilities and engineering services, but its facility-builders
have worked on a single-institution basis, and facility-users, even when they
have cooperated across institutional lines, have had little need to formalize
their organization. Recently, however, the facilities that have seemed worth
building cost more than any single institution could raise. Thus, university
astronomers have struggled with the trade-off between centralizing project management
and maintaining their individual institutions' prerogatives and traditions.
On a broad level, all the observatory-building collaborations adopted similar organizational structures. All four vested ultimate intra-collaboration authority in a Board of Directors comprised of representatives from the member institutions. In one case, each member had a representative; in the rest, representation reflected the relative sizes of the members' contributions. The Boards met (face-to-face or by conference call) at least twice a year and as often as six times a year.
In all four projects, one individual was most responsible for the physical construction of the observatories. In two cases, the individual was an engineer and formally designated the "project manager." In one case, the individual was an astronomer and formally designated the "observatory director." In the last case, the leading scientist geographically closest to the observatory site was most responsible for construction, and he held the title "project director." In three of the cases, the collaboration organized advisory committees of scientists from the member institutions to deliberate on trade-offs between enlarging scientific capabilities and assuming engineering and financial burdens in the development of the observatory, to decide on broad specifications for additional scientific instruments for collaboration-wide use, and to plan a series of commissioning measurements to test the observatory's capabilities and shake down its component parts. In the fourth case, meetings of the Board of Directors came to include more individual participants and effectively served as a forum for general discussion of the collaboration's plans and prospects. Finally, in three cases the Board of Directors occasionally commissioned external panels to perform design reviews of major observatory components.
Within this common structure of Board of Directors, principal administrator, intra-collaboration advisory committees, and external design-review panels, these collaborations varied mostly by the degree to which they chose to professionalize the development and construction of their observatories. Two of the collaborations were strongly professional, meaning the collaboration empowered a trained project manager to get the observatory built by contracting out for services to private corporations. One of the collaborations preferred self-management, meaning the participating scientists managed collaboration resources and relied more on university staffs and students than external contractors to design and build the observatory. Finally, one of the collaborations fell between these two extremes.
The professionally managed collaborations empowered their formally designated project managers to build an autonomous organization to carry out the development, construction, and integration of the major observatory components. The project managers operated mostly by contracting out for services. The activities of scientists at the member institutions were restricted to development and construction of scientific instruments that were peripheral to the observatory's systems engineering, to advising the project manager on the specifications for the contracts to be let, and (when relevant) to building technologically novel components. Conflicts between scientists and project management were common over the degree of technical and financial risk to assume in the interest of achieving the highest possible scientific performance. Such conflicts were noticeably more intense in the memories of participants in a project in which scientists were building a technologically novel component that was organic to the observatory's systems engineering. While both scientists and project management had equivalent administrative access to the Board of Directors for settlement of disputes, the burden of proof, as a rule, lay with the scientists. The Boards for these projects considered building observatories that embodied the scientists' original insights to be a sufficient challenge for project management, and they protected managers from pressures to continue pushing the state-of-the-art.
The moderately professionalized observatory-building collaboration, like the highly professionalized ones, operated mostly by contracting out for services, with an individual designated to keep the contractors centrally coordinated. However, in this instance, the Board selected a scientist from one of the member institutions to be observatory director and the coordinator of the contractors without giving the director or his member institution the authority to hire the contractors. Instead, the contracting was spread across all the member institutions. When the collaboration succumbed to the temptation of accepting sizable technical risk (though at no additional cost) to achieve greater scientific capabilities than originally planned, and the contractor developing the technically risky component ran into difficulties, the collaboration as a whole suffered. As word of the problems of one contractor spread through the collaboration, the observatory director, given his lack of hiring and firing authority over the contractors, did not have the clout to keep the rest of the contractors from letting their schedules slip. The collaboration came to view this organization as inadequate, and in pursuing a second major project, it has added a project manager, who reports to the observatory director, to track and evaluate the progress of contractors.
The self-managed collaboration went beyond the moderately professional collaboration by not only letting the member institutions be the administrators of observatory development and construction but also by doing much of the work in-house. The division of institutional labor was part of the formal agreement that formed the collaboration. Initially, this collaboration was going to have an engineer serve as project manager, but the individual resigned early in the collaboration's life, and the Board of Directors decided not to hire a replacement. No single entity filled the vacuum in inter-institutional coordination. The Board itself used its meetings to identify collaboration-wide tasks and to assign sub-groups to carry out the needed work. An Executive Committee, consisting of one scientist from each institution, held conference calls every two weeks to assess development. And the scientist whose institution was responsible for the bulk of the hardware development was designated "project director" and his institution oversaw activity at the observatory site. With money tight (and in the absence of professional project management to negotiate the best value for the needed design and construction services) the collaboration came to operate on a cash-conserving, build-it-yourself basis[1]. Graduate students and postdocs were heavily relied on to perform labor that could have been done by construction workers.
None of the collaborations we studied
centralized project management to the point that its Board of Directors, comprised
of representatives of each member institution, became a figurehead body. In
all our cases, the Board of Directors was a vibrant, decision-making body [2].
. . .
H. Communication Patterns
All of these collaborations strongly centralized communication concerning observatory
design and construction in the office of the project manager (or his equivalent
in the less professionally managed collaborations). Information from SWGs, instrument
builders, and contractors flowed to the project manager, who kept the Governing
Board and scientists at member institutions apprized of progress and developments.
When collaboration members disputed a project manager's decisions, they directly
communicated their concerns to members of the Governing Board.
Communication concerning observatory use for scientific research was strongly decentralized. Time allocation committees of member institutions usually did not inform each other of the proposals they received, and scientists who could benefit from coordinating their observations had to learn about each other and make arrangements on their own. The self-managed collaboration came closest to centralizing some communication concerning observatory use. Its Governing Board has considered trying to coordinate the efforts of several scientists in order to implement large observing projects that no individual scientist could readily carry out.
I. Social and Scientific Significance
Only one of these collaborations finished building its observatory on time and
on budget, and it was one that had professionalized development and construction.
The others either suffered from amateurism in their cost estimates or outright
considered a slower pace of construction less evil than creating a powerful
organization that could build an observatory punctually by spending money quickly
and efficiently. All of the collaborations succeeded (or apparently will) in
building their observatories, though the ones that overran construction schedules
have had problems operating as well as was initially specified, because too
many of the principal individuals in the development of individual components
had become too busy with new work (taken on during the construction delays)
to participate in observatory integration and shake-down. The observatories
all have been or will be used for a wide variety of studies. The common contribution
to astronomy of three of the observatories has been to show that part of a national
observatory's capabilities can be built on a several-university budget; the
fourth stands for the ability of several universities to build a general-purpose
observatory around a technologically novel and challenging component when private
philanthropists are willing to donate $100 million.
Observatory-building projects, in
the opinion of nearly all interviewees, are for tenured professors who are uninterested
in moving, because these projects absorbed scientists' time without generating
scientific accomplishments needed for building a career in astronomy. Scientists
in the more professionalized collaborations were prone to complain about the
power and personality of the project manager, while scientists in the more self-managed
collaborations were prone to complain about the quantity and pace of the work.
However, such conflicts were not project-threatening, and none of the interviewees
mentioned the possibility of empowering an individual to balance scientific
and engineering interests. The interviewees implicitly understood that both
professional management and self-management have their virtues, both come at
a price, and there can be no fundamental mid-stream change in organizational
approach to managing observatory development.
. . .
VIII. SPACE SCIENCE
A. Introduction
For space science, AIP interviewed approximately 100 participants in six multi-institutional
projects that were all launched between 1975 and 1985. (In the terminology of
the field, "project" refers to the effort to launch, operate, and
analyze data from spacecraft; we will use "project" in the space scientists'
sense in this section.) These figures include the projects and interviews undertaken
in our parallel study of the European Space Agency (ESA). AIP staff and consultants
consciously tried to cover a range of features in the selection of projects
to investigate: projects managed by different space flight centers, projects
whose participating scientists came from a variety of institutions, international
and nationally organized projects, astrophysical and planetary science projects,
and smaller and larger projects. In our choice of interviewees, the AIP staff
sought to cover all the types of people who might be vital to the documentation
of scientific work, from administrators at funding agencies to graduate students
at university departments. However, the perspective of flight-center scientists
and engineers is strongest, because they turned out to be the best sources of
documentation of space science projects during the period we studied.
. . .
C. Organization and Management
NASA has imposed a formal structure on space science projects. Program managers
at NASA Headquarters, engineers by training, have overseen project managers,
also engineers by training, at NASA space flight centers. Project managers have
overseen the design, construction and integration of spacecraft, including their
payloads of scientific instruments. The PIs, scientists by training, have designed
and built scientific instruments. A project scientist, typically an employee
of the space flight center, has advised the project manager on spacecraft engineering
options that could affect the project's scientific capabilities and has kept
the other PIs informed of spacecraft engineering developments. To discuss and
resolve collective scientific concerns, the project scientist has led meetings
of a "Science Working Group" (SWG) of PIs and select members of their
teams. The project scientist has also reported to a program scientist at NASA
Headquarters, who has been able to bring scientists' concerns to the program
manager at Headquarters or their mutual superiors.
These arrangements have attempted
to manage an intrinsic tension in the concept of space science projects: which
is the more difficult and significant challenge—sending and operating equipment
in space, or satisfying criteria of scientific value? All space projects have
had common problems of design and operations, and project managers are expert
in building apparatus that will function in space. However, science projects,
whether pursued in space, the natural earth environment, or the laboratory,
have been valuable only if they yielded new or improved data. By providing scientists
with their own line of communication to higher authorities, NASA has reminded
project managers that they must serve as well as manage the PIs. Projects vary
in how they cope with this tension.
. . .
1. The Scope of the Science
Working Groups
Science Working Groups in our sample varied in how much business they handled.
Scientists appear to have been torn between limiting the scope of the SWG, and
thus maximizing their autonomy from each other, and expanding the scope of the
SWG, and thus maximizing their unity in dealing with project engineers and outside
scientists.
. . .
Most commonly, the SWG restricted itself to dealing with collective issues that were engineered into the project's initial design, such as problems of interference between scientific instruments or the protocol for coordinating the operations of the instruments. At the other extreme, the SWGs for the two projects that originated outside flight centers felt the need to expand their scope in order to secure or maximize the project's scientific values. These two projects suffered through more conflicts than the others we studied, because the SWGs wanted responsibilities that the project or program manager considered their province.
Even the projects with expanded SWGs kept significant areas of science activity in the control of their projects' experiment teams and outside the SWGs' jurisdictions. Experiment (i.e., instrument) builders almost always cared principally about the spacecraft's capabilities and their individual interfaces to it rather than the capabilities and designs of other experiments. Individual teams decided when, where, and what to publish. When scientists within a project reached different conclusions about the same topic, they almost always disseminated their views individually without attempting to reach an intra-project consensus.
2. The Scope of Flight Center
Officials
In every project, the flight center project manager was responsible for the
project's money and schedule and was usually the most powerful individual in
the project during its design and construction. In most cases project managers
imposed their flight center's customs on the project. Most issues were resolved
in communiques between PIs (or their engineers) and the project manager (or
a staff member the project manager assigned to track science payloads). Even
when the PIs resented the flight center's culture or the project manager's style,
they usually accommodated each other.
. . .
During mission design and construction, the needs of the project manager consistently
determined the scope of the project scientist's work. When the SWG dealt with
collective science issues without requesting additional resources, the project
manager needed the project scientist's guidance on when engineering expediency
might upset the scientists' planning. When the SWG incubated conflicting ambitions
that the spacecraft could not handle, the project manager needed the project
scientist to adjudicate conflicts among the scientists and mediate between the
scientists and project management.
. . .
After the launch, project scientists administered project funds for data analyses and fielded proposals from members of science teams pursuing longer-term research on their data sets. Once funding for the project ceased, science teams had to obtain funding for analyses in the general competition for NASA program grants.
3. Coordination Among Flight
Centers
The cases we studied included three international, multi-flight center projects:
two multi-spacecraft projects in which one spacecraft was built at each flight
center, and one single-spacecraft project in which the flight centers each built
part of the spacecraft. The multi-spacecraft projects were consciously organized
to minimize inter-flight center engineering interfaces, to maximize the project
managers' individual and collective latitude, and to leave coordination of the
project's greater-than-national capabilities to post-launch operations—the
province of the SWG, which operated as an international body in both these projects.
In the case of a single spacecraft that had systems built by multiple flight centers, the project staffs communicated heavily to discover and solve the integration problems before the scheduled launch, but the nations still had their own SWGs, which operated autonomously. Each flight center's SWG had designated blocks of time in which it could specify how the spacecraft should be operated.
4. The Scope of NASA Headquarters
Officials
Once Headquarters had selected a flight center, selected the PIs, and initiated
the flow of money for a project, its officials lost most but not all ability
to exert daily influence over a project. Whether they continued to be active
in a project depended on the project's budget and the intensity of conflict
between scientists and project management. When a project was unusually expensive,
or when conflict within the project was sufficiently intense, Headquarters officials
were influential. Even when not interested in exercising influence, program
managers often collected excellent records, because project managers were careful
to report thoroughly and to invite program managers to important meetings. To
do otherwise was to risk exciting a program manager's suspicions that a project
harbored hidden problems. Program scientists only became significant when participating
scientists and project managers could not resolve their conflicts.
D. Activities of Experiment
Teams
"Experiment" in the terminology of space science has referred to the
design, construction and operation of an instrument plus processing and interpreting
the signals the instrument returns. For purposes of design and construction,
an instrument was often broken down into self-contained "boxes," whose
mechanical interfaces were cleanly and simply specified at the start of the
project and whose digital interfaces could be worked out over the course of
construction. The head of a team usually has the title "principal investigator"
(PI), and that is how we will use that term[3]. Other team
members with independent standing as scientists usually held the title "co-investigator."
The significance of that title, as will be seen, has varied.
"Scientists interested in carving out a niche for themselves in space experimentation must "space qualify" an instrument by demonstrating that it can survive the rigors of launch and operate in the harsh environment of space. Experimentalists have routinely employed two strategies to meet these difficult challenges. First, they consciously looked for laboratory instruments they thought could be adapted for use in space without compromising too severely on the instruments' scientifically valuable features. Second, they have relied on components that have proven their reliability in commercial or military use[4] and rarely attempted to develop and use technical novelties unless an industrial firm was interested in taking up the novelty's manufacture. Once experimentalists have space qualified an instrument, they usually have not even considered diversifying into a new area of instrumentation because of the competition they would face from established specialists.
Experiment teams have usually had a center-periphery structure. At the center has been a small number of institutions overseeing hardware development and basic data-processing software. On the periphery are scientists, often from other institutions, providing additional expertise in the science analysis of the data. In this manner, work on the many technical problems of space-based instrumentation have been efficiently centralized without wasting data on experimentalists unaware of all the ways the data could be used.
"Co-investigators" has
been the common term both for scientists who contribute to an instrument while
working at a different institution from the PI and for scientists who increase
a team's scientific breadth. When co-investigators contributed to instrument
design and construction, the PI had to decide on the allocation of the experiment's
spacecraft resources among the instrument's components and was responsible for
keeping the several parts compatible. Co-investigators who were included to
increase scientific breadth never influenced the technical development of an
experiment; they were chiefly of symbolic importance, demonstrating the existence
of outsiders' confidence in the scientific value of a proposed experiment.
. . .
H. Communication Patterns
The space science projects we studied always structured formal communication
in a hub-and-spoke fashion. However, the office at the hub varied and the importance
of the hub in comparison to the spokes shifted with stages of the project. Consequently
it is difficult to cast trustworthy and meaningful generalizations.
The most important communication hubs during the conceptualization of space science projects have been the NASA and ESA space flight centers. However, other institutions in both the United States (Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, American Science & Engineering) and Europe (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics) have also successfully functioned as hubs for conceptualization. (More recently, the "Working Groups" that advise "discipline scientists" at NASA Headquarters have become pro-active in the design of science projects.) The "spokes" in this initial stage have been experimentalists with hopes of tailoring a project to fit their instrumentation expertise.
Once a project was conceived, a "discipline scientist" or "division chief" at agency headquarters became the hub for project communication. Project instigators fed information to their agency advocate. Spokes consisted in this stage of members of the agency's advisory panels (and in the United States, the National Academy's Space Studies Board) that compared the virtues of projects vying for funding.
When headquarters secured funding
for a project, it declared a project manager and a project scientist at a space
flight center to be the communications hubs. The project manager received and
passed on the information the PIs needed to build instruments that were technically
compatible with each other and the spacecraft. The project scientist received
and passed on the information the PIs needed to develop their data acquisition
strategies. In the event of an irreconcilable conflict, each had a contact at
agency headquarters. The project manager was the more important hub during design
and construction; the project scientist became more important after launch.
. . .
I. Social Significance
Space science collaborations have been high-risk, high-reward ventures for their
participating scientists. When projects have succeeded, participants obtained
unprecedented data. When they have failed—and failure can easily be due
to factors beyond scientists' control—participants have still had to continue
to compete for career rewards with disciplinary peers obtaining data in safer
fashion. Increasing participants' nervousness has been their impression that
the number of flight opportunities has been decreasing and the time spent in
their design and construction has been increasing. Instrument designers on university
faculties feel most threatened, because long, risky undertakings are not well
suited to graduate students. By contrast, university scientists without direct
responsibility for instrumentation have happily prospered when they have been
able to learn enough about an instrument to use its data with imaginative sophistication.
As economists have long noted, failure must be tolerable for people to accept risks. The challenge for space science communities will be to keep failure from becoming intolerable for scientists. If flight opportunities for experimentalists are few, then there must be career rewards for those who successfully provide desirable space instrumentation for projects that fail. If professional productivity is judged by the quantity and quality of papers published in journals of astronomy and planetary science, then there must be enough flight opportunities for experimentalists to recoup from project failures. Recent NASA policy has favored more frequent launchings of smaller scientific projects.
SECTION TWO: ARCHIVAL FINDINGS (by Joan Warnow-Blewett) [Back To Top]
In our full report, Documenting
Multi-Institutional Collaborations, this section includes archival findings
from all the fields studied by the AIP followed by some findings on the impact
of the Web and other electronic records and a passage about other findings of
archival interest. These Highlights contains excerpts from the archival findings
from each field and closes with an excerpt from the subsection, Other Findings
of Archival Interest.
I. INTRODUCTION
This report is based on a number of sources: (1) archival analysis of over 450
interviews on the nearly 60 selected cases for the disciplines included in the
AIP Study; (2) the patterns uncovered through the historical-sociological analysis
of these interviews; (3) discussions with archivists at the home institutions
of interviewees; (4) site visits to discuss record-keeping with administrators
and records officers (especially at federal funding agencies) involved with
our disciplines; (5) discussions with National Archives and Records Administration
appraisal archivists for the federal agencies; and (6) the AIP Center's general
knowledge of archival institutions in various settings.
. . .
II. FIELDS STUDIED BY THE AIP
A. Geophysics
The best locations to find the records of geophysics projects, according to
the interview subjects, are the Science Management Offices (SMOs) and the consortium
headquarters; they are, for example, the most likely locations for collaboration-wide
mailings. SMOs provide the likely locations for records of project administrators,
Science Working Groups (SWGs) and executive committees. Similarly, consortium
headquarters have the records of the project's chief scientists (director, president,
etc.), its standing committees (and, perhaps, subcommittees), and its Executive
Committee. Other key players at consortium headquarters are staff scientists
or engineers who work with each scientific party. For example, for the Ocean
Drilling Program, one of the staff scientists assists the co-chief scientists
with the planning and ship-board administration. Because of these responsibilities,
records of the staff scientists would provide valuable documentation. However,
at SMOs and consortium headquarters, there were typically no formal record-keeping
requirements imposed by the collaboration. In certain geophysics or oceanography
projects, the ships' logs provide a central record of a project, and perhaps
even metadata concerning the conditions under which data were collected. These
logs are often considered to be institutional records; their value in documenting
projects is sometimes overlooked.
Because projects in geophysics have
a longer, more political, prefunding period—our investigations located
additional categories of records at policy-making bodies. These records were
at the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and, at the international
level, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO).
. . .
Geophysics projects—like others
in the field sciences—generate electronic data of long-term usefulness
for scientific research. In addition, samples taken in field research (such
as cylinders of sediment and rock) are often preserved for future research.
Although our study did not focus on the final disposition of the data created
by these projects, we know there are many electronic data centers for these
disciplines. The largest holder of geoscience data in the United States is the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with a number of facilities
across the country (e.g., the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder).
In the cases we studied, it may not always have been mandatory for individual
investigators to deposit their data into a data archives. By and large the trend
is for more stringent requirements. We are aware that some electronic data are
found by archivists in the records of individual scientists; when this happens,
archivists should notify the appropriate data center.
. . .
B. Ground-Based Astronomy: Observatory
Builders
We found that the patterns of organization and management of all telescope-building
collaborations are quite similar. All four collaborations included in our case
studies vested authority in a Board of Directors, and made one individual most
responsible for the physical construction, usually with the title of project
manager but occasionally another title. In most cases they organized Science
Advisory/Science Steering Committees of scientists from the member institutions
to develop scientific instruments and advise the project manager on the trade-offs
between scientific capabilities and engineering and financial burdens. In the
building collaborations in which national observatories were members, management
has been unified, giving decision-making power to a project manager when the
scientific and engineering leaders clash and lessening the authority of the
Board of Directors as representatives of member institutions. Virtually all
of the individuals holding these positions are on university faculties where
archival repositories are available.
Despite these similarities, the difficulties of documenting the work of telescope-building collaborations are distinctive among the disciplines covered by the long-term AIP Study, and this is true for the building of both academic and national observatories.
In the case of academic observatories, funding is mostly from non-federal sources—private university endowments, state university allocations, and private foundations; support from federal funding agencies exists in some cases, but has been limited in its scope, e.g., to support site development. Private funding usually means less stringent records requirements. Collaboration proposal files, progress reports, correspondence with grant officers, and other related records may never have been created or—when they have—may be more difficult to find in university administrative files or in records of private foundations. When considering which university should be most responsible for saving records of an observatory's design, construction, and operation, we look to the university with which the observatory was affiliated; in most cases this will also be the university that has the largest membership on the collaboration's Board of Directors (reflecting the size of its obligation).
Documenting the building of national observatories is complicated by the records policies of the National Science Foundation (NSF)—the agency that supports the building and maintenance of the national observatories in the U.S[5]. Unlike the Department of Energy's contract laboratories, the NSF's contract laboratories and observatories do not create federal records; accordingly, these national observatories are not required by law to maintain records management programs or secure records of archival value. While at least some national observatories retain records, we are not aware that any of them have archival programs. To make matters worse, national observatories are not affiliated with universities or other organizations with archival programs and thus lack natural repositories.
C. Ground-Based Astronomy: Users
of Observatories
If it is difficult to document the building of observatories, it seems virtually
impossible to document collaborations of observatory users—at least radio
telescope users[6]. The reason is straightforward. They leave
a scanty paper trail (except for observational data) because:
The best documentation of a given collaboration is to be found in the lead scientist's proposal for use of a participating observatory's telescope and his/her collaboration-wide correspondence. For minimal documentation, then, we need radio observatories to have policies to preserve their proposal and evaluation records. For a richer record, we are dependent upon lead scientists to save their papers and their employing institutions to accession them for their archives.
It is highly unlikely that the scientific
data of VLBI (very long-base interferometry) collaborations will be useful for
future research. As we learned, the data streams from each of the participating
observatories had first to be successfully correlated. Although these correlated
data are preserved following NASA regulations, considerable processing is required
before correlated data can be the basis for scientific interpretation; further,
our interview subjects agreed that this processing required too much familiarity
with the original observing conditions and instrumentation for anyone who had
not been involved with the data acquisition.
. . .
D. Materials Science
Our historical analysis of collaborations in materials science makes distinctions
between those that make use of accelerators for synchrotron radiation and reactor
facilities at DOE National Laboratories and those that do not. Our archival
analysis is strikingly different for these two categories.
Collaborations that do not use national laboratory facilities present documentation challenges whether managed by universities or corporations. In two of three instances of university-managed collaborations, the collaborations made final funding decisions on institutional members' research; all three cases lacked a physical location beyond their offices at the fiscally accountable university. In a field with strong participation of corporate organizations, it is not surprising that our case studies included an instance in which the collaboration was managed by a corporate member which no longer exists because it was merged into another corporation. Such mergers confront corporate historians and archivists with questions concerning successful transfers of records; we can only urge corporations in such situations to be responsible for adequate transfer of archival records.
As usual, support by federal science agencies generates some core documentation. However, a cautionary note is in order. NSF centers (the Science and Technology Centers and the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers) have emerged in recent decades on university campuses; most, if not all, of the centers make the final decisions on which researchers at member institutions get funded. This delegation of some authority from NSF to its centers diminishes the detail of documentation at NSF Headquarters; thus, it is important for university archives to take responsibility for securing their NSF centers' records of long-term value.
The characteristics of those collaborations
that did make use of accelerators or reactors at DOE National Laboratories (half
of our case studies) are quite different from those materials science collaborations
that did not. For one thing, they had some attributes similar to those we were
familiar with from other studies involving DOE National Laboratories: they were
all required to submit both technical and managerial plans to the Facility Advisory
Committees (our generic term for a variety of titles) of the laboratory facility,
and they all had a liaison with the DOE Laboratory facility (whether called
spokesperson, staff director, or an untitled member who played the role). These
characteristics assure preservation on the part of the DOE National Laboratories
of some core records and help us locate documentation for significant collaborations.
On the other hand, we found that the collaborations rented space for offices
at the synchrotron laboratories, these offices are freestanding and impermanent,
and the collaborations do not create federal records unless the DOE laboratory
is a formal member of the collaboration. We also found that each institutional
member of a collaboration raised its own funds; typically academic institutions
go to NSF and corporate members use internal funds.
. . .
E. Medical Physics
It is virtually impossible for us to assess with any certainty the archival
situation in the area of medical physics. The reasons are several. The AIP Study
experienced difficulties in persuading individuals in the discipline to participate
fully (or at all) in our interview program and found that even the more eminent
leaders of the community were not at all familiar with questions of documenting
their discipline for historical and social science studies. Also, the AIP Center
has had little experience in documenting the research activities of medical
schools or other medical research centers, in saving papers of individual practitioners[7],
or in dealing with the key funding agency—the National Institutes of Health
(or its constituent parts, such as the National Cancer Institute)[8].
Consequently, our appraisal guidelines and our project recommendations to funding
agencies and research institutions in the field are—for the most part—merely
suggestive.
F. Particle and Nuclear Physics
1. Introduction
The initial phase of our long-term study of multi-institutional collaborations
was devoted to high-energy physics. During our third, and last, phase of the
project we examined briefly the area of heavy-ion physics. We found the characteristics
of the disciplines to be so much the same that (with the agreement of the Working
Group) we have combined our findings as collaborations in particle physics.
Moreover, we have been told that our findings conform to those in nuclear physics
experiments. Thus, this disciplinary category is now titled, particle and nuclear
physics.
. . .
It is interesting to note that in the brief period between the time our high-energy physics projects were conducted and those we studied of heavy-ion physics were conducted, there were some management changes. In addition to the numerous well-known roles from high-energy physics, we found management structures in heavy-ion physics more familiar to us from collaborations in other disciplines—in one a project engineer and in the other a project manager—as well as a technical committee and a board made up of representatives from member institutions. These structures may indicate emerging complexities in the various areas of particle and nuclear physics collaborations that archivists should be on the lookout for.
2. Archival Analysis
The main locations of records appear to be in the hands of spokespersons; at
the laboratories; and, to a lesser extent, with group leaders. We focus here
on records with spokespersons and at the laboratories.
a. Spokespersons
Spokespersons, in nearly all of the cases we studied, had the most complete
documentation. We found that the larger the collaboration, the more likely the
spokesperson was to have kept the proposal and related materials. In addition,
most spokespersons have some unique materials, e.g., correspondence with laboratory
administration.
With larger numbers of people and
institutional members, the role of spokesperson has come to encompass managerial
tasks. There is, for example, ample evidence that intra-collaboration mailings
correlate with the larger, more recent collaborations; responsibility for such
mailings falls largely on spokespersons. In the best cases we've seen, their
"archives" were well-organized and covered all aspects of the collaboration's
work, including minutes of collaboration meetings (technical reports from group
leaders and others on their assignments for detector development and data analysis,
etc.), technical memoranda, and other intra-collaboration mailings. In other
cases, spokespersons appeared to have kept many of these files but they were
literally in piles all over their offices and may be difficult to extract from
other, unrelated materials. Conversely, collaborations with fewer than 30 people
and four or five groups, as was common in the 1970s, communicated more by telephone
and in less formal meetings, resulting in far thinner documentation.
. . .
b. Accelerator Laboratories
The AIP Center was aware from its earlier study of DOE National Laboratories
that these laboratories were the best source of documentation on the activities
of their Physics Advisory Committees. (There are variations on the title of
these committees; we refer to them generically here as PACs.) Site visits during
the current project established that the laboratories still retain a full set
of PAC records, including proposals from collaborations for experimental work
and accelerator beamtime and minutes of the PAC's decision-making process.
The AIP Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations provided evidence for other significant documentation of collaborations at the laboratories. During the 1980s, more detailed agreements emerged covering the responsibilities of both the laboratory and each of the institutional members of a collaboration. These responsibilities range from detector development and construction to provision of computer facilities and financial commitments. The most detailed of these agreements today are called Memoranda of Understanding.
There has been a very significant
shift of responsibilities from individual investigators and universities to
the laboratories. Recently, the laboratories have been exercising tighter control
over experiments—at least the larger, more expensive ones. For one thing,
major funding for large detectors is now likely to come directly to the laboratories
from DOE and NSF, rather than to the institutional groups. In addition, there
are increasing and widespread demands for accountability on the part of DOE
in such areas as fiscal matters and health and safety. In some cases, the need
for tighter control on the part of the laboratories may be reflected in the
spokesperson being a laboratory staffer; in other cases, the spokesperson may
be required to remain on site during the entire construction period of the experiment.
Finally, there was evidence of yet another shift from academic laboratories
to accelerator facilities—for fabrication of detector components; in addition,
as detectors become bigger and more complex, laboratories tend to have more
permanent staff in order to maintain detector components. Overall, the trend
is for the laboratories to be the location for many technical records.
. . .
G. Space Science
In the field of large space science collaborations in the United States, NASA
provides virtually all of the funding and much of the technical and managerial
expertise through its space flight centers. Space science projects have formal
record-keeping requirements related to the organizational structure NASA imposes
on its projects. Also, since participating scientists create individual instruments
which have to be integrated into a single spacecraft, considerable formally
documented interaction between flight centers and the experiment teams takes
place. The situation is very similar for the European Space Agency (ESA) and
its flight center. For these reasons, substantial documentation is virtually
always created by space science projects. The creation of records does not,
of course, equate with saving those records. Outside of NASA, creating and saving
records is largely based on the personal inclinations of participants.
The bureaucratic structure imposed
by NASA—especially at the flight centers—means that certain offices
are held responsible for specific aspects of NASA projects and are expected
to create specific categories of records. Because of this, records are created
almost regardless of the circumstances of the particular instrument-building
team (such as number of member institutions and geographical distribution).
At the NASA Headquarters level, however, more documentation is generated for
joint projects with space agencies abroad, and for missions funded from budget
lines that attract annual congressional scrutiny.
. . .
The best documentation for information
concerning scientific aspects of the mission, according to the scientists who
responded to our questionnaires, are the records of the Science Working Group.
These materials are normally located with the project scientist, who chairs
this group of principal investigators.
. . .
Finally, our investigations located
a small number of categories of records (about 10) that, taken as a whole, provide
adequate documentation for all multi-institutional collaborative research in
space science. For any one project these records are located at several settings.
The main locations of records in the United States are at the National Academy
of Sciences in its Space Studies Board records (previously the Space Science
Board)[9]; in the hands of discipline scientists, program scientists,
and program managers at NASA Headquarters, project scientists and project managers
at NASA flight centers, and PIs of project experiments (instruments). At ESA
the important policy groups to document are the Science Programme Committee
and the Space Science Advisory Committee and its two working groups: the Astronomy
Working Group and the Solar System Working Group. Additional records are those
of the European Space Science Committee of the European Science Foundation;
it synthesizes, promotes, and coordinates advice on European Space science and
policy from the space science community in Europe. Finally, funding agencies
of the several nations involved in each mission independently pass judgement
on proposals to build experiments for ESA projects.
. . .
H. Computer-Mediated Collaborations
In the third and last phase of the long-term study, the AIP determined that
it should deliberately examine a new category of collaborations that might well
become more dominant in future collaborative research. The principal characteristic
our three case studies in this category have in common is the central role of
computer science and technology—hence the name for this group, Computer-Mediated
Collaborations. In this area, the AIP sought to learn of the relative health
of these new kinds of projects: would they continue and thrive over the near
future? We also needed to obtain a clearer picture of the ways, if any, the
focus on computer science and computer techniques would affect a collaboration's
organizational structure and the records the collaboration generated, as well
as which records should be preserved.
. . .
Would these new computer-mediated
collaborations prosper in the near future? From our site visits to NSF and DOE
and the meeting of our Working Group, the resounding, general answer must be
yes. For one thing, the NSF STCs [Science and Technology Centers] appear to
be thriving and we can believe some of them will be devoted to research in computer
science and technology. The Grand Challenge is no longer a formal NSF program
unto itself, but it seems reasonably clear that such projects will be considered
under the Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) program under development
at NSF. Collaboratory-style projects will also fall within the KDI at NSF and
continue receiving support at DOE under its Mathematical Division, which—under
various names—has been the organization within DOE for high-end computing.
It is important to note that collaboratory techniques are now implemented by
projects in a wide range of disciplines from electronics to research in AIDS[10].
. . .
IV. OTHER FINDINGS OF ARCHIVAL
INTEREST
B. Trends in Multi-Institutional Collaborations
We close with one more striking change. Collaborations in one field may take
on characteristics of those in another field. The point was made clear to us
at the last meeting of the AIP Study referred to earlier. The subject was the
role of the builders and the users of detectors/instruments in the fields of
particle physics and ground-based astronomy. A decade or more ago, most particle
detectors were built and used by the same, single collaboration and most telescopes
were built by a collaboration (and then maintained by the facility) for other
scientists to use. The current situations are quite different because of the
increasing sophistication of the instruments/ detectors and the need for more
sophisticated processing of much larger amounts of data. New multi-purpose detectors
in particle physics have practical lifetimes that may equal those of the accelerators;
this means the detectors are used by more than one collaboration and that maintenance
has shifted to new permanent, technical staff at the accelerator facility; thus,
detectors are moving toward the model of astronomy in terms of builders and
users of instrumentation. Meanwhile, in the case of ground-based astronomy,
the instruments—the equivalent of particle detectors—are increasing
in cost faster than the telescopes; the huge increases in costs for instruments
and data processing have inspired ground-based astronomers to begin looking
into management practices in particle physics collaborations.
PART B: APPRAISAL
OF RECORDS CREATED
[Back To Top] [Introduction]
[Part A] [Part C]
In the AIP Study, our extensive fieldwork is followed by the other phase of macroappraisal projects: analytical studies to develop documentation aids for archivists, records officers, and others responsible for the records of multi-institutional collaborations. In this part of our report, we offer aids to records appraisal through three approaches: a typology of multi-institutional collaborations, functional analysis of records creation, and appraisal guidelines.
Those responsible for records should recognize the value of these analytical essays. They are reality-based, derived as they are directly from our extensive fieldwork with participants of collaborations, and the period under study is almost current. As a matter of fact, we can characterize our macroappraisal work as a historical-sociological study of organizational trends of multi-institutional collaboration and their archival implications.
SECTION ONE: TYPOLOGY OF MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATIONS (by Joel Genuth) [Back To Top]
One of the most fascinating products of the AIP Study's program of interviews is the classification scheme or typology developed by the project historian and sociologists for the organization and management of collaborations. The area of organization and management is the aspect of collaborations most closely connected to the generation and accumulation of records.
The basis for the typology is "cluster analysis"—a statistical technique that groups objects on the basis of how closely they resemble each other across a range of variables. The project team performed cluster analysis on the organization-and-management variables for the 46 collaborations for which we had complete information. They found variables that were sufficiently inter-related to justify reducing them to four factors:
The result of the cluster analysis is that collaborations can be reasonably divided into four organizational types. With one notable exception, organizational types are not field specific—meaning that the particular disciplinary specialty of a collaboration (e.g., materials science or geophysics) is not a clue to its organizational type. The exception is particle physics.
The first organizational type is comprised of collaborations with a high degree of formalization, high degree of hierarchy, high scientific leadership, and specialized division of labor. We designate this type "highly structured." The second and third types differ from the first in that they are comprised of collaborations that are either less formal or less hierarchical than the highly structured. They are distinguished from each other by their needs for scientific leadership and by their method of dividing labor. The second type—"semi-structured with no scientific leader"—never has a designated scientific leader and usually has a specialized division of labor; the third type—"semi-structured unspecialized"—usually has a designated scientific leader and always has an unspecialized division of labor. The collaborations in the fourth type register the lowest amounts of formalization and hierarchy, while still possessing scientific leadership and a specialized division of labor. We designate them "low-structured."
We focus on this last type in the Highlights.
The low-structured type of collaboration is, as the label suggests, the absence of the classic features associated with Weberian bureaucracy. The membership of this type is dominated by particle physics collaborations. Among all the specialties in physical research we covered, particle physics alone has a distinct style of collaboration. Occasionally, particle physics collaborations fall outside the main category for particle physics and occasionally collaborations in other specialties most closely resemble a typical particle physics collaboration, but it seems justified to speak of "particle physics exceptionalism."
Particle physics collaborations are exceptional in their combination of two characteristics. First, the participants find that their collaborations are highly egalitarian. Compared to what we heard from collaborators in other disciplines, particle physics collaborators describe decision-making as participatory and consensual, define their organizational structure through verbally shared understandings rather than formal contracts, and institute fewer levels of internal authority. At the same time, in contrast to collaborations that did not publish scientific findings collectively, the scope of particle physics collaborations encompasses nearly all the activities needed to produce scientific knowledge, including those activities most sensitive to building a scientific career. The collaborations always collectivize the data streams from the individual detector components built by the participating organizations, they frequently track who within the collaboration is addressing particular topics with the data, and they routinely regulate external communication of results to the scientific community.
Particle physics collaborations minimize the powers that collaboration managers can exercise in order to make their members comfortable with the large breadth of activities that the collaboration as a whole regulates. In all other research specialties we examined, participants in collaborations were more autonomous than particle physicists in the generation and dissemination of scientific results; and the participants (more or less happily) allowed collaboration managers to exercise discretionary powers to secure what the collaboration as a whole needed.
The prevalence of high-breadth, egalitarian collaborations in particle physics is due to: (1) the dispersal of particle physicists among many universities, (2) the specialty's centralized institutional politics, and (3) competitive pressures. Because particle physicists in the United States and Europe are dispersed among many universities and because they crave integrated, multi-component detectors, they need to be in high-breadth collaborations in order to conduct publishable research. Because collaborations must submit proposals to central authorities for access to an accelerator, participants are behooved to commit to an organizational structure that convinces the accelerator laboratory's administration that they are properly organized to produce what they promise. With respect for internal structure thus secured before any commitment of resources to the collaboration is made, collaboration administrators have not required formalized powers to maintain order and could afford to grant broad rights of participation to all members of the collaboration, from graduate students to senior faculty. Such Athenian-style democracy has produced publications rather than cacophony because competition for discoveries—and for career-advancing recognition—limit the collective tolerance for intra-collaboration dissent.
SECTION
TWO: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF RECORDS CREATION [Back
To Top]
(by Joan Warnow-Blewett with the help of Anthony Capitos)
The key functions of all scientific activities can be summarized as establishing research priorities, administration of research, including development of instrumentation, the research and development itself, and dissemination. We list the key functions of multi-institutional collaborations below and illustrate the process of functional analysis by providing a brief analysis of the functions along with the categories of records created through these activities. Details on these categories of records are provided in the Appraisal Guidelines section of our full report.
Our Highlights excerpts have been drawn from the field of geophysics.
I. ESTABLISHING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
A. National/Multi-National/Discipline Priorities
Geophysics
Establishing broad research priorities in geophysics and oceanography, as in
space science, is done on a discipline level. When global phenomena seem important,
priorities are worked out not only in national but in multi-national disciplinary
organizations. This function of establishing research priorities is carried
out in many different arenas. In the United States, the National Academy of
Sciences' advisory boards, such as the Ocean Studies Board, the Polar Research
Board, and the Board on Atmospheric Science, are sites for the scientific community
to voice their opinions concerning broad program ideas. On an international
scale, organizations like the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU)
and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), along with programs like the
International Geophysical Year, have helped to set goals in the fields of geophysics
and oceanography. In ICSU, priorities for broad areas to pursue typically rise
up through one or more of the international unions for scientific disciplines
(e.g., the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics), its interdisciplinary
bodies (e.g., the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research), or its joint programs
(e.g., the World Climate Research Programme). Through interaction with these
groups and institutions, the scientific community promotes ideas for large multi-institutional
collaborations.
Documentation: National Academy of Sciences' Ocean Studies Board, Polar Research
Board, and Board on Atmospheric Science; International Council for Scientific
Unions (its unions, interdisciplinary bodies, and joint programs), and the World
Meteorological Organization.
. . .
B. Individual Project Research
Priorities
Geophysics
The more specific hypothesizing and defining of priorities takes place as programs
or projects are focused and shaped by the scientific community. In the cases
we studied, we found two different approaches by research scientists: obtaining
funding for formal workshops (usually employed by "technique-aggregating"
projects) and informal gatherings (usually employed by "technique-importing"
projects)[11].
In the formal workshop approach, instigators for projects obtain support from funding agencies to hold workshops for interested research scientists which define the scope and methodology of the project, select members of an Executive Committee and an institutional base to serve as the project's Science Management Office, along with a principal investigator (PI) to administer it, and initiate a set of proposals for submission to a funding agency.
For the international projects we studied, ICSU and WMO have been particularly influential in setting up workshops and symposia, which typically generate a number of workshop panels. If project proposals receive the blessing of ICSU and WMO, workshop panel members and other interested scientists submit proposals to their national funding agencies and ICSU's members—the national academies—feel pressured to provide support.
In the less formal approach, the process of establishing priorities for specific projects can be initiated wherever key research scientists get together. Meetings of the American Geophysical Union or review panels of funding agencies are examples. Some, but not all, consortia need funding to set themselves up and prepare proposals. In the technique-importing projects we studied, funding agency personnel played an important role in defining the terms of consortia formation and, in some cases, later project research activities.
Whether the approach is formal or
informal, scientists involved in the instigation of geophysics and oceanography
projects should take care in documenting these initial meetings and workshops.
Documentation: Minutes and other records of workshops and initial meetings of
consortia, proposals to funding agencies, correspondence of program managers
at funding agencies, professional papers of scientists.
. . .
II. ADMINISTRATION OF R &
D
A. Support/Funding
Geophysics
In the geophysics cases we studied, domestic funding was provided by various
agencies (and often more than one). The process involves submission of proposals
to discipline program managers at funding agencies, peer and panel reviews at
the program level and—for larger projects—review at the highest policy
level, such as the National Science Board of the NSF. To be more specific, technique-aggregating
projects submit a package of proposals to one or more funding agencies where
a set of individual proposals (and, thereby, principal investigators) are selected.
For the most part the technique-importing projects we studied were supported
by block grants from funding agencies to the consortia which, in turn, selected
proposals for using the imported techniques; however, in two of these cases,
would-be individual users had to submit proposals for approval by the funding
agency.
Finally, we note that consortia
are funded, in part, by institutional members.
Documentation: Consortia standing committees and subcommittees, program managers
and proposal files at funding agencies, and professional files of principal
investigators. Additional documentation, at higher levels not dealt with by
our study, will be found in the records of university administrators, records
of the Office of Management and Budget, and records of the U.S. Congress.
. . .
B. Staffing
Geophysics
Staffing of geophysics and oceanography projects is most visible in records
of workshops and consortia and the subsequent funding process. Workshops and
consortia select committees and science administrators; proposals, as a minimum,
identify principal investigators and, often, prospective team members. Decisions
to fund proposals are made at various levels of funding agencies or by committees
of consortia. Additional information on staffing of projects would be in the
records of chief administrators, staff scientists, and papers of principal investigators.
Documentation: Workshop and consortia records, Science Working Groups and consortia
committees, funding agencies, chief administrators, and professional files of
principal investigators.
. . .
C. Organization and Management
Geophysics
In technique-importing projects there would normally be a consortium responsible
for appointing standing committees (or more than one, or one with subcommittees
responsible for separate aspects of the project). These advised or directed
project executives. A consortium in these projects proceeded in one of two ways:
(1) it created an arena in which institutions could participate as equals even
when one among them was made responsible for administration, or (2) it created
a new independent, freestanding entity in which the involved institutions could
vest responsibilities that they did not want any extant member institution to
dominate. The technique-importing projects have needed to operate far longer—in
order to apply the technique to many objects of curiosity—than the technique-aggregating
projects. They have, therefore, adopted a more secure institutional base and
more formal chain of command. Project executives include an Executive Committee
and a chief administrator. Another key position at some project headquarters
is that of staff scientist.
Documentation: Consortia headquarters records, records of federal funding agencies,
and professional files of principal investigators.
Technique-aggregating projects united multiple, independent principal investigators who formed a Science Working Group (SWG) that, in turn, selected members for an Executive Committee. In these projects, there would typically be a modest Science Management Office run from an institution and under the direction of one of the principal investigators with grant funds to spend on coordinating logistics for the principal investigators.
Technique-aggregating projects, as compared with technique-importing projects, usually have a more ad hoc, informal institutional base in order to maximize self-governance. The SWGs for these projects are critical in managing what is intrinsically collective to the design of the projects, such as the allocation of space and the track of oceanographic research vessels, the distribution of core samples, a common data processing algorithm for combining data streams from several individual instruments, and protocols for comparing data sets obtained by deploying several techniques at the same site. That was usually the limit of power allotted to a project's Science Working Group, although—for example—the Executive Committee of the working group might be called on at times to add a judgement of project relevance to the proposals to funding agencies. The rest was left to the discretion of individual principal investigators.
The Science Management Office (SMO),
under the direction of its principal investigator, is responsible for the logistics
of technique-aggregating projects. The office provides technical infrastructure
and gets people and their equipment to the site where they can take their data.
While this was challenging in all cases, it was particularly so for ship-based
oceanographic projects as compared to land- and space-based geophysics projects.
SMOs have also been responsible for creating centralized data management systems
to facilitate exchanges of data streams and to maintain project-wide data bases.
They have also organized post-field-work workshops for intra-project exchanges
of preliminary findings, which—among other things—often inspired joint
data analyses efforts.
Documentation: Science Management Office's principal investigator files including
records of the Science Working Group and its Executive Committee.
. . .
III. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
A. Instrumentation
Geophysics
Research and development of instrumentation for academic geophysics mostly takes
place in geophysical research institutes, which maintain engineering staffs
to service the facilities they provide their research staffs. University departments
of geophysics or geology usually do not have the research-and-development laboratories
and machine shops to support design and construction of instrumentation. However,
the body of instrumentation available for academic geophysical research is supplemented
by the efforts of commercial interests (e.g., oil exploration companies) and
governmental functions (e.g. detection of nuclear weapons tests) to develop
instrumentation that university geophysicists may parasitically use or adapt
for their purposes.
Documentation: Records of consortium Executive Committees as well as other standing
committees (and subcommittees where they exist). Records of project Science
Working Groups, administrators of the Science Management Offices, and other
principal investigators.
. . .
B. Gathering and Analyzing Data
Geophysics
While preliminary plans for gathering and analyzing data were spelled out in
proposals, the more detailed plans were developed by individual principal investigators
and consortium administrators of technique-importing projects and by Science
Working Groups (made up of all principal investigators) and Science Management
Office administrators of technique-aggregating projects. Virtually all principal
investigator teams kept logbooks on the data-gathering techniques they employed
(instruments, locations, and so forth) that would provide the metadata necessary
for data analysis. The data gathered by the cases studied by the AIP included
electronic data, cores (of ice, of sediment) and water samples.
Documentation: Consortium administrators, including staff scientists; Science
Management Office (Science Working Groups and administrators), professional
files of principal investigators, and databanks.
. . .
IV. COMMUNICATING AND DISSEMINATING
RESULTS
Geophysics
In most cases, collaborations in geophysics and oceanography required that each
team produce an article that would be published with the others as a set—often
as a special issue of a science journal. However, collaborations did not control
the content or author lists of publications. Instead, it is the principal investigator
of each experiment who is in control of the team's data and publications. Members
of other teams must obtain permission of the principal investigator to use the
data; in such cases, it is traditional that the principal investigator would
be asked to review the draft publication and be listed as an author. If a member
of their own team prepares an article for publication, it is customary for principal
investigators to review the article and be listed as an author. The inclusion
of other members of the team as authors varies from case to case. Arrangements
for making oral presentations are typically even more informal, although principal
investigators would usually be aware of their team members' plans.
Documentation: Chief administrators at consortia and Science Management Offices,
professional papers of principal investigators and other team members, and press
releases and other public affairs materials.
SECTION THREE: APPRAISAL GUIDELINES (by Joan Warnow-Blewett with the help of Anthony Capitos and Lynn Maloney) [Back To Top]
The scope of these guidelines is records created by multi-institutional groups that participate in collaborative research projects. Also, for the fields of geophysics and space science, we have included records of groups that set national and international policy. Outside the scope of these guidelines are the records created by other activities at the government laboratories, universities, and other institutions involved, and by other activities of individual scientists. We recommend different appraisal guidelines for these materials.
Finally, these guidelines reflect
two of the purposes of the AIP Study: (1) to identify a small set of core records
that should be permanently preserved for all collaborations in a given disciplinary
field and (2) to distinguish the wider array of documentation that should be
preserved for selected experiments—those that are of major scientific significance
and, if possible, some that are of special value because they can serve as typical
or representative of a period or category of experiment—and that, therefore,
will be of high interest to future historians, sociologists, and other users.
Hereafter, these selected experiments will be referred to as "significant."
Action mechanisms for identifying these experiments are included in our Project
Recommendations.
. . .
Although our focus in this appraisal
section is the field of materials science, we open it with an important excerpt
from our General Appraisal Guidelines that applies to all the scientific disciplines
covered in the AIP Study:
Papers of Individual Scientists
To document significant collaborations (as well as careers of distinguished
scientists), archivists and records officers should place the highest value
on the papers of PIs and other leaders of multi-institutional collaborations.
Papers of these scientific leaders are prime locations for documentation of
a number of topics, including details of staffing, plans for data gathering
and analysis, and use of the data by collaboration members. The papers will
typically contain proposals, personal notebooks, and correspondence with other
collaboration leaders and with funding agencies. In cases where the scientific
leader was also an instigator of the collaboration, the files may provide especially
unique documentation of the initial thinking and early plans of the project.
When individual scientists have been leaders of significant collaborations or
have regularly played a leading role in important research, the records of their
participation should be saved (whether or not the full range of papers documenting
their careers merits archival preservation).
. . .
III. FIELDS STUDIED BY AIP
D. Materials Science
1. Core Records to be Saved for All Collaborations
a. NSF Cooperative Agreement Jackets for Centers
It is important to distinguish between grants for NSF research projects and
cooperative agreements for NSF centers—Science and Technology Centers (STCs)
and, in this case, Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSECs).
Grants provide funds for best effort and contracts specify deliverables with
awards and punishments; contracts now have largely been replaced by the more
flexible cooperative agreements. Among other things, cooperative agreements
allow NSF to get involved in administration and become partners with its centers.
Jackets for NSF center cooperative agreements contain somewhat different documentation.
In addition to proposals, referee reports, minutes of panel meetings, and progress
and final reports, the jackets include NSF site visit reports, and (we recommend
that they include) valuable preproposals. On the negative side, since most,
if not all MRSECs and STCs make the final decisions on which researchers at
member institutions get funded, the NSF jackets lack funding details (e.g. individual
proposals) of the research of MRSEC and STC collaborations. Overall, future
historians and other users will find documentation of the initial plans and
ambitions of a center, how the center had to modify its plans to suit NSF, and
community reactions to the center's plans and accomplishments. For further details,
see General Appraisal Guidelines in our full report. Locations: Records of MRSECS
are in possession of NSF's Division of Materials Science; records of STCs are
in NSF's Office of Science and Technology Infrastructure.
b. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Administration) Proposal Files
Proposals, referee reports, MOUs/Intellectual Property Agreements, and progress
and final reports. The proposals document the plans and ambitions of the collaborations
and the level of information the participants were willing to share about their
individual capabilities prior to the negotiation of an intellectual property
agreement. The MOUs/Intellectual Property Agreements document the terms on which
the corporations could jointly participate and could individually share information
with the participating universities; successful negotiation of the MOUs was
a prerequisite to the start of funding from DARPA. Files should also contain
projected schedules of deliverables and reimbursements that provide the basis
for intra-collaboration milestones. For details, see General Appraisal Guidelines.
Location: In the possession of the relevant DARPA program officer.
c. NSF Grant Award Jackets
In most materials science collaborations using facilities at national laboratories,
each institutional member raises its own funds, with corporate members using
internal funds and academic institutions going to NSF. In at least some cases,
member institutions apply jointly to NSF. Award jackets include proposals documenting
the plans and ambitions of the collaboration, referee reports, minutes of panel
meetings, and progress and final reports. For details, see General Appraisal
Guidelines. Location: In possession of NSF's Division of Materials Science program
officer.
d. Proposals to Corporate Management
Corporate researchers proposing to build and share a beamline at a DOE National
Laboratory have to convince their corporate management to underwrite a share
of the construction costs. These records are the functional equivalent of a
proposal, albeit less formal than what university scientists submit to a federal
funding agency. Likely locations: In the records of individual researchers or—where
they exist—in the archives of the corporation.
e. Records of Executive (Program)
Committees of MRSECs and STCs
In both the MRSECs and STCs, scientists or groups of scientists desiring funding
have to submit an annual proposal (which, among other things, is supposed to
justify the interdisciplinary and multi-institutional aspects of their work
that make them acceptable for this sort of funding). A collection of such proposals
comes to the Executive (Program) Committee for evaluation. That evaluation sets
the scientific agenda. The records of this review process (proposals, reviews,
and award decisions, etc.) would provide a definitive record of the scientific
evolution of the MRSEC or STC project as well as insight into the management
criteria imposed. A sampling, at least, of these files (every three or five
years) should be preserved. Likely locations: In records of the MRSEC or STC
or the academic officer it reports to (e.g., the vice-president or associate
provost for research).
f. Records of Facility Advisory
Committees (FACs) at DOE National Laboratories
The materials science collaborations using facilities at DOE National Laboratories
in our case studies used two synchrotron radiation facilities and one breeder
reactor facility. Use of these research facilities is governed by a Facility
Advisory Committee (FAC); this is our generic term to cover several titles used
by the laboratories. E.g., Argonne's Advanced Photon Source (APS) has two relevant
FACs: (1) the APS Program Evaluation Board, a scientific peer advisory board
that evaluates proposals to form research teams to gain research access to the
APS and reviews subsequent scientific performance; it formally advises laboratory
management on the scientific appropriateness of proposed research and the likelihood
of success and (2) the APS Management Plan Review Committee, a staff committee
that reviews management plans of collaborations and advises APS management on
the collaboration's readiness to sign a formal Memoranda of Understanding (MOU)
and begin construction and subsequently operate beamlines at the APS. In general,
FAC records include proposals, letters of intent, and conceptual design reports
submitted by the collaboration to apply for space to develop a beamline and
end stations. The records will not include proposals for money, since each member
institution is responsible for its own funding, but researchers will find MOUs
between the collaboration and the DOE facility covering obligations of the collaboration
and the facility to each other. The files may also provide justification for
FAC actions and recommendations. Interviewees indicate that these are the best,
perhaps the only, collective statements of collaboration goals and strategies.
The records of the FAC for the breeder reactor are also important for the impact
of safety concerns and regulations. Location: At the relevant research facility
at the DOE National Laboratories.
g. Memoranda of Understanding
between Member Institutions
Sometimes referred to as joint agreements, these legal documents lay out the
powers of the collaboration's Board of Governors, the obligations of the member
organizations, and their privileges to use the finished beamline. They include
terms on which staff scientists will work with the corporations on proprietary
research. Likely locations: In the records of the Facility Advisory Committee
for the relevant DOE National Laboratory facility and in the archival records
of collaboration member institutions.
. . .
2. Records to Be Saved for Significant
Collaborations
We have previously stated the importance of identifying and securing a wider
array of documentation for a selection of highly significant multi-institutional
collaborations. Because of their scientific importance, extensive records of
such collaborations will be needed by science administrators and policy-makers
as well as future historians, sociologists, and other users.
For this Highlights report, we do
not include records descriptions but merely list the series titles of records
to be saved for significant collaborations in the discipline of materials science.
They are: (a) Records of Executive Board (or Governing Board, Program Committee,
or Technical Representatives Committee); (b) Records of External Advisory Committees;
(c) Records of Annual Meetings of the Collaboration; (d) Records of Spokespersons/Staff
Directors; and (e) Newsletters and Sector Descriptions. For details, see the
full report, Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations.
In Parts A and B, we covered the initial phases of the documentation strategy research employed by the AIP Study: the findings of our field research and our analyses of the data collected through that research.
In Part C we introduce another stage of documentation strategy research—a stage that is particularly suited to a discipline history center like the AIP Center—in which we address policy and programmatic issues. The purposes of this stage are two-fold: (1) to pinpoint records of long-term value that are at risk under current procedures, and (2) to develop recommendations for policies and procedures to safeguard records that will be needed by research administrators, historians and other scholars. For the AIP, this stage is critical. We conduct the first stages to learn how to document an area. With that knowledge in hand, we assess the ability of archival and record-keeping programs to secure the important records; then we issue formal policy recommendations to institutions that have control over the records.
When we compare the scope of the records needed to document collaborations
against our assessment of current archival policies and practices, the urgency
of our project recommendations is abundantly clear.
SECTION ONE: CURRENT ARCHIVAL PRACTICES (by Joan
Warnow-Blewett and R. Joseph Anderson) [Back
To Top]
Our excerpts in this section illustrate the AIP Study's findings in the various sectors including academia, corporations, and federal agencies.
I. INTRODUCTION
Archival policies and practices differ widely in the USA. The differences can
be seen most clearly in terms of the sectors of our society in which the institutions
operate. We have organized this section of our report accordingly.
The AIP's knowledge of archival programs has accumulated since its history program was initiated in the early 1960s. Those experiences—trying to save one scientist's papers at one repository—bore little resemblance to our present goal of documenting multi-institutional collaborations. Now, we might need to save the records of one collaboration at several repositories—repositories that probably would be in different sectors (academic, government and/or government-contract, and, perhaps, corporate institutions).
In the spring and summer of 1997, the AIP History Center conducted surveys of archives at leading research universities and at corporations with strong R&D programs to assess their ability and willingness to identify and preserve the records of historically important multi-institutional collaborations and the papers of key collaboration members. We also wished to improve our overall knowledge of these archives; that knowledge was based on a variety of sources, including interviews with archivists, published sources, site visits, correspondence regarding preservation of papers, and other contacts. Our contacts with corporations have been far less frequent than with universities.
The AIP also needed to broaden its understanding of the ways federal science
agencies operate—in particular, how well their records management programs
protected their historically valuable records. After years of site visits and
interim reports on records programs at these agencies (and at the National Archives,
the repository for agency records), the AIP assembled the first-ever meeting
of science agency records officers and representatives of the National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA). The meeting achieved its goal of updating
and clarifying our knowledge of current programs at the agencies and at NARA.
. . .
II. ACADEMIC ARCHIVES
B. AIP Survey of Academic Archives
The repositories that we surveyed generally are at the top of the academic tree.
They are located at major research institutions whose programs in the physical
sciences represent the best and most prosperous of American academe, and their
faculty include many of the leaders in the multi-institutional collaborations
that we have studied[12]. We sent the academic survey to 42
repositories and received a total of 37 returns for a response rate of 88%.
The academic questionnaire contains 12 questions and seeks two kinds of information.
First, we asked respondents to describe their program; questions included the
size of the staff and the collection, whether there had been staff expansion
or reduction in the past five years, expansion space for the collection, the
nature of records management, and policies on electronic records and collecting
personal papers of faculty and staff. Second, we asked whether they would accept
collaboration-related records of faculty who were key participants in multi-institutional
collaborations and the records of the collaboration itself if it was headquartered
on their campus.
. . .
The findings from the academic survey are mixed, but the results seem generally positive. The range of programs is very wide in terms of staff and collection size. A little over a third of respondents reported fewer than five staff—almost certainly fewer people than needed to adequately document a major research institution—but nearly a quarter said that they had 15 or more staff, which seems large by university archives standards. At a minimum we were able to identify an archivist or similar staff member at all the institutions in our target group, and the question about staff additions/reductions during the period 1992-1997 reveal a fluctuating pattern of loss and gain rather than the sharp declines that we had heard about anecdotally during this era of government and academic downsizing. Overall, in fact, respondents reported a few more staff additions (41%) than staff reductions (39%).
More significant for our study of multi-institutional collaborations, 82% of
respondents said that they would accept the collaboration-related papers of
their faculty who were key participants in highly ranked collaborations, and
78% said that they would accept the administrative records of a highly significant
collaboration if it was headquartered at their university. An important reality
check here is that the AIP Center's International Catalog of Sources for History
of Physics and Allied Sciences (ICOS) contains entries for the records of only
three multi-institutional collaborations already in academic archives. In light
of this, the strongly positive responses to these two questions should probably
be interpreted as evidence of willingness to preserve records of collaborations
rather than of active efforts to identify and accession them. However, the responses
offer the hope that if a third party like the AIP History Center is able to
rank collaborations and help identify valuable papers and records, most of the
archives in this sample may be willing to provide a home for those related to
their university (because of a major role by faculty or the site of an administrative
office).
. . .
III. FEDERAL AGENCIES
Each federal agency is required by law to have a set of records schedules that
determines how long records will be retained and when records of long-term value
are to be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
These schedules must be approved both by senior management at the agency and
by NARA.
It is not enough to review the records schedules from federal agencies; a review of the records management program which will implement the schedules is equally important. When discussing records programs with agency records officers, their description of the p