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AIP Working Group for Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations in Space Science and Geophysics
Although the multi-institutional collaboration is increasingly the organizational framework for scientific research, it has received only incidental attention from scholars. Without a dedicated effort to understand the process of collaborative research, even the records necessary for efficient administration, for historical and management studies, and for posterity, will be largely scattered or destroyed. The Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) is working to redress this situation with a multi-stage investigation. The aim is to identify patterns of collaboration, define the scope of the documentation problems, field-test possible solutions, and recommend future actions. The first phase of the study addressed high-energy physics. In this, the second phase of the study, we address space science (understood as the study of regions outside the Earth's atmosphere by scientific instruments launched on spacecraft) and geophysics (including oceanography). Since each discipline presents different documentation problems, the AIP study makes two types of contribution. It provides details on the organization of these particular disciplines, and it takes a step toward better understanding of new research structures, little studied hitherto, that exist in other areas of science, technology, and beyond.
The AIP study of space science and geophysics research focused on projects that originated between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Almost all involved American institutions, but few involved only American institutions. Some 200 interviews were conducted, indexed, and analyzed to identify patterns of collaborative research and patterns of records creation, retention, and location. Project staff surveyed the records-keeping practices of scientists and engineers and made numerous site visits to critical institutions to discuss archival issues and records policies.
We found that in space science, the large government space agencies (NASA in the United States and ESA in Europe) imposed a similar, formal structure on collaborative projects. But scientists in the project could vary that structure when it did not well suit their ambitions. The agencies vested managerial authority in engineers at space flight centers. In most cases, participating scientists preferred to deal individually with this project manager, limited their collective concerns, and thus maximized their autonomy from one another. We found exceptions, however, when scientists hoped a project would demonstrate capabilities that would stimulate the creation of a new sub-community or would redirect the efforts of an extant sub-community. Then they tended to expand their collective concerns and unite behind the leadership of the scientists who instigated the project, in order to increase their leverage with project management.
In geophysics, funding agencies have been too numerous to impose a structure on projects. Projects tended to cluster around one of two types. One type, which we call "technique-importing projects," sought to introduce into academic geophysics a set of capabilities that had proven their utility in other areas of science or in industrial field work. The scientists who instigated such projects usually formed consortia; these hired executives who managed the adaptation and deployment of the technique under the supervision of the consortium's standing and executive committees. Such consortia have become freestanding institutions in their own right, enduring for decades on the strength of the demand from scientific communities for the use of the technique. The second type, "technique-aggregating projects," sought to organize diverse experimental specialists for the investigation of a site or a process. The instigators of such projects usually designated one of their number to direct a "Science Management Office" (SMO) that saw to the logistics of deploying the several experiments. Once the experimentalists had their data and funding for the project ended, the SMOs disappeared into the fabric of their director's home institution.
We found extensive archival problems. Most scientists, like other groups, only keep documents when they think they are useful to them. Good records-keeping may be acknowledged by all as necessary while the experimental process is alive, but when the experiment is over records can easily be neglected, forgotten, or destroyed. We encountered instances where even Federal records that The National Archives and Records Administration has recommended be preserved have been lost.
Records of space science collaborations accumulate at readily identified offices in the space flight centers that manage the projects and at funding agency headquarters. Records of geophysics projects accumulate at consortia headquarters and SMOs, but these records are not usually Federal. Program managers at funding agencies accumulate records during the initial formation of a project, but then often become detached from project management. We appraised records in terms of the quality of evidence they provided concerning the research process. "Core" records that should be preserved for all major multi-institutional collaborations include records of national or international agencies that support the initial development of the project; records of funding agencies documenting the project's proposal process; records of project science management or consortia headquarters offices and committees; publicity materials; scientific data with adequate explanatory "metadata"; and summary financial records. Additional documentation should be provided by saving professional papers of distinguished scientists who have carried out research in space science or geophysics collaborations.
We developed recommendations to promote preservation of valuable documentation for future use by science administrators, policy-makers, and historians and other scholars. The single most important recommendation urges Federal science agencies to employ professional archivists as part of their records management staff. It has been seen how effective professional archivists have been at scientific settings, such as some of the laboratories of the Department of Energy. This addition would help the National Archives understand the unique records creation process at each of the science agencies while increasing the effectiveness of the records management program at each of the agencies.
The study of collaborations in space science and geophysics was guided by a working group of distinguished scientists, science administrators, archivists, historians, and sociologists. It was supported by the AIP and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the National Science Foundation.
PART A: SUMMARY OF PROJECT ACTIVITIES AND FINDINGS [Back to Top]
I. PROJECT GOALS, METHODOLOGY, AND ACTIVITIES
Part A of this report is a summary of the analysis contained in Report No. 2. Readers who want full explanations of concepts and terms, or more complete descriptions of the events on which we base our findings, should instead read Report No. 2.
Please note that Part B of this report, Project Recommendations, is not to be found elsewhere.
A. Purpose and Methodology of the Long-Term Study of Collaborations
Since World War II, the organizational framework for scientific research is increasingly the multi-institutional collaboration. However, this form of research has received slight attention from scholars. Without a dedicated effort to understand such collaborations, policy makers and administrators will continue to have only hearsay and their personal memories to guide their management; even the records necessary for efficient administration, for historical and management studies, and for posterity, will be largely scattered or destroyed.
The Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), in keeping with its mission to preserve and make known the record of modern physics and allied sciences, is working to redress this situation with a multi-stage investigation into areas of physics and allied sciences where multi-institutional collaborations are prominent. The goal of the study is to make it possible for scholars and others to understand these transient "institutions." In order to locate and preserve historical documentation, we must first get some idea of the process of collaborative research and how the records are generated and used. Hence, we are making a broad preliminary survey, the first of its kind, into the functioning of recent research collaborations that include three or more institutions. Our study is designed to identify patterns of collaborations since the mid 1970s and define the scope of the documentation problems. Along the way, we are building an archives of oral history interviews and other resources for scholarly use. The AIP Center will make use of its findings to recommend future actions and promote systems to document significant collaborative research.
Having a clear view of goals is especially important in an environment of reduced funding and other constraints. As collaborative research becomes ever more pervasive in our world, archivists and records officers cannot avoid addressing documentary issues. These reports are designed to help responsible parties develop appropriate goals and set priorities to save the records of greatest historical value.
The long-term study began in 1989. Phase I, which focused on high-energy physics, was completed in 1992.{1} Phase II, which addressed collaborative research in space science and geophysics, is completed with this report. Phase III, now underway, will focus on creating a comparative perspective over a large array of fields and developing recommendations to improve the documentation of multi-institutional collaborations in general.
The choice of the particular fields of high-energy physics, space science, and geophysics offers advantages through their contrasts with one another. Multi-institutional collaborations became prominent in these fields during the upsurge of government funding of science following World War II. In all these fields, the need to place extremely complex measuring instruments on limited data-taking facilities drives the formation of multi-institutional collaborations; while high-energy physicists need particle accelerators, space scientists and geophysicists need space probes, satellites, oceanographic vessels, seismic networks and so forth. But while high-energy physics generates its data in laboratory experiments, both space science and geophysics rely on field observations. Furthermore, while American high-energy physics is mostly supported by only two Federal agencies, the global collection of data in space science and geophysics makes them organically dependent on the actions of various national governments and the creation of inter-governmental cooperation. In Phase III, we are expanding to include a still wider variety of situations.
The AIP Study of Multi-Institutional Collaborations is guided by a Working Group of distinguished scientists and science administrators, archivists, historians, and sociologists who join in designing the project's methodology and research instruments and review its findings and recommendations. (See Report No. 2, Appendix C-1: "AIP Working Group for Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations in Space Science and Geophysics.") Several members also serve as consultants. The project is directed by Joan Warnow-Blewett with the assistance of Spencer R. Weart. Frederik Nebeker and Joel Genuth have served as project historian and Lynn Maloney, Janet Linde, and Anthony Capitos as project archivist.
B. Phase II: The Study of Collaborative Research in Space Science and Geophysics
The AIP Center's study of space science and geophysics focused on 14 projects which began in the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Six projects were chosen for the study of space science, eight for geophysics. For a list of the case studies selected, see Report No. 2, Part A: Space Science, Section 1: "Selected Case Studies in Space Science" and Report No. 2, Part B: Geophysics, Section 1: "Selected Case Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography." In making our choice of projects, the AIP staff and consultants consciously tried to cover a range of features: internationally and nationally organized projects; smaller and larger projects; in space science, projects managed by different space flight centers, and both astrophysical and planetary science projects; and in geophysics, seismological, climatological, and oceanographic projects. The AIP staff conducted some 200 interviews (102 in space science, 106 in geophysics) in order to cover all types of people potentially vital to the documentation of scientific work, from administrators at funding agencies to graduate students at university departments. Along with the personal interviews, the interview subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire concerning their record-keeping practice, of which 91 were returned (34 for space science, 57 for geophysics). Because of the AIP Center's relative lack of familiarity with funding agencies and research laboratories active in space science, geophysics and oceanography, and because of the complexities and varieties of collaborative structures in these disciplines, our methodology emphasized site visits. The project staff made 63 site visits to university archives, government laboratories (including space flight centers), government-contract laboratories, and corporate laboratories along with six visits to the National Archives to discuss archival issues and records policies. The strategy was to learn a little about a lot in the belief that broad exposure was essential to producing sound recommendations for archivists and policy makers.
By making a historical-sociological analysis of project interviews, we were able to bring to our site visits a distinct picture of the institutional structures and functions that had the greatest impact on the initiation, funding, planning, management, and operation of projects. The findings from the project's analysis and site visits, filtered through our previous knowledge of archival institutions, provide the single most reliable guide to identifying areas of documentation problems and potential solutions.
Support for this phase of the project was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives and Records Administration, and the National Science Foundation. Additional support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided for international travel and made it possible for the AIP project staff to conduct the parallel study of the European Space Agency.
II. HISTORICAL-SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: SPACE SCIENCE [Back to Top]
This essay serves two purposes. First, it introduces concepts for characterizing those aspects of multi-institutional collaborations in space science that are most important to generating or locating documents of likely interest to historians of science and technology. Second, it offers observations on where the organizational framework of the government-funded, multi-institutional collaboration may affect the social relations and careers that are necessary for the pursuit of scientific research.
The most important finding is that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have imposed a formal structure on space science projects. However, projects were formed for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, and scientists and engineers have been able to modify the mandated structure to fit their circumstances. These modifications have consequences for archival policies and practice.
In the following sections we discuss how space projects were created and funded, how they were organized overall, and how the separate experiment teams operated. We conclude with general considerations on internationalism and on careers in space science.
A. Formation and Funding
By the late 1960s, when the earliest of the projects we studied originated, space scientists and engineers were familiar with a division of labor in which engineers were responsible for designing and building science-friendly spacecraft and scientists for designing and building spacecraft-friendly instrumentation. To participate in the design of a large space project, scientists have had to be aligned with engineers in institutions that space agencies would fund. Scientists in university departments lacked the resources to play central roles in creating the projects we studied{2}, and the only corporate scientists who instigated a project shifted their institutional base to carry it out. Our evidence suggests that university departments have been unable to afford spacecraft-design expertise and therefore specialized in the design and use of research instruments. Conversely, aerospace firms have specialized in spacecraft construction.
The NASA and ESA space flight centers have housed the engineering expertise to form projects. Their central role enabled the agencies to designate formal phases of project formation and formal structures for subsequent organization. But flight centers did not monopolize the resources necessary for creating space-science projects{3}. A few government-contract research laboratories outside the space agencies, through Department of Defense patronage in the United States and the patronage of national science agencies in Europe, have also developed the expertise to build space science projects. When scientists and engineers in these laboratories hatched plans that attracted other scientists, the plans were different from those hatched with the support of flight centers, and the participants modified the formal procedures and structures.
In their formative stage, two principal distinctions characterize the six projects we studied. Four were initiated with flight center support while the impetus for the other two came from outside the centers. Four took their scientific impetus from prospects for improved measurements of physical processes. The other two relied on opportunities created by rare astronomical configurations.
Common to all cases was the desirability of having an advocate at agency headquarters to argue the project's viability within the politics of the agency's budget. Headquarters advocates handled the clearances needed to initiate funding at the agency and sometimes at higher political levels. The scientists and engineers who ended up spending project funds were rarely involved in decisions that compared the value of science projects serving different disciplines, or in decisions that compared the value of science to other space activities. Their principal spheres of activity in the politics of funding decisions lay in convincing panels and working groups, whether organized by a national academy or a space agency, to endorse their projects as the most likely to advance a field of science.
The difficulty of a headquarters advocate's work depended on the expense of the project. NASA has funded science projects either from its "Explorer Program," for which it has received an annual appropriation to fund relatively inexpensive projects, or by obtaining a dedicated budget line for particular larger projects. Project-promoting scientists and engineers liked to fit into the Explorer Program and avoid the uncertainties of higher politics. In these cases, "discipline scientists" at Headquarters were usually the project's advocates. The discipline scientist appointed a "working group" which was the principal advisory body that had to be convinced of the merits of the project. European space scientists, like Americans instigating an Explorer project, have not had to face an external political hurdle every time they united behind a major project, for ESA's science budget has been set on a five-year basis.
When NASA projects have been expensive enough to require a special budget line, instigators have obtained advocates who worked at the directorate level of Headquarters. In these cases, the advocates applied to the Space Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences for support, and formed ad hoc working groups to consider individual aspects of the project.
Project instigators who were within a flight center or cooperating with one have more easily found effective advocates at Headquarters than scientists agitating from outside. Typically, insider scientist-instigators spotted spacecraft developments or configurations that could be used for significant scientific purposes, or flight-center engineers spotted astronomical configurations that justified the use of spacecraft for science projects; such people already had direct bureaucratic links to headquarters discipline scientists, whose professional satisfaction lay in successfully promoting projects. The reward to the headquarters scientist who succeeded in agency budget politics has been to participate in issuing an "Announcement of Opportunity" to solicit proposals, and to lead in the selection of proposed experiments. In these cases, space scientists have accepted the necessity of empowering headquarters scientists to decide among proposals that differed significantly in cost, level of technical risk, or science strategy.
The project instigators who eschewed flight-center cooperation impressed themselves on Headquarters by persuading leaders in relevant experimental techniques to sign onto integrated proposals. These supporters signed on because the projects, in addition to offering opportunities to improve on measurements, had potential for stimulating a redirection of a subcommunity's research efforts or for the creation of a whole new subcommunity aligned with their expertise and interests. By participating in these integrated proposals, the scientists partially subverted the usual prerogatives of headquarters scientists.
On the basis of the character of the projects we studied and their varying paths to fruition, we tentatively suggest a crude spectrum of project types, correlated with their social origins{4}. The project types range from community-reforming at one extreme through community-affirming in the middle to community-creating at the other extreme. The mid-spectrum projects came from flight centers. At either extreme were outsider-instigated projects, whose participants' ambitions to redirect a sub-community's attention or to create a new sub-community might have seemed an excessive exercise of governmental power if mobilized through a flight center.
Several institutional settings have served as communication hubs for the formation of space science projects. Most prominent have been the NASA and ESA space flight centers, which have been central in the community-affirming projects because their engineers want outside scientists' opinions on what engineering capabilities would advance the scientists' specialties. But several research institutes that have developed the expertise needed to conceive space science projects were communications hubs for the formation of community-reforming and community-creating projects. Moreover, NASA Headquarters officials have told us that for projects more recent than those we studied, advisory committees of scientists have served more as hubs for forming projects and less as reviewers of others' plans.
B. Organization and Management
NASA's organization of space science projects has attempted to manage an intrinsic tension: which is the more difficult, challenge-sending and operating equipment in space, or satisfying criteria of scientific value? By vesting authority for budget and schedule in a project manager, who works for a space flight center and reports to a program manager at Headquarters, NASA has placed space scientists under the discipline of engineers well versed in space projects generally. But NASA also designated a project scientist to advise the project manager on matters of general scientific significance. Furthermore, the principal investigators (PIs) formed the nucleus of a Science Working Group (SWG), where project-wide science issues were raised and resolved. By granting the project scientist the right to raise issues important to the PIs directly at Headquarters, NASA has reminded engineers that in science projects they must serve as well as manage the PIs.
The multiple lines of power built into the formal structure of space science projects has insured that even projects that fit well into that structure will vary significantly. There was still more variance in projects that grafted the formal structure onto one of their own making. Instances of both types are well represented in the projects we studied. The formal structure does create consistent terminology for identifiable elements of space science projects, and we have used that terminology for this report.
1. The Scope of the Science Working Groups. The SWGs 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 one another, and expanding the scope of the SWG, and thus maximizing their unity in dealing with project engineers and outside scientists. Usually, the SWG for a project that originated in a flight center restricted itself to dealing with collective issues that were engineered into the project's design. For planetary projects, selecting the flight path of spacecraft was the outstanding example of such an unavoidable issue. For astrophysical projects, initial selection of objects for observation was the outstanding collective issue.
In projects that originated outside any flight center, the SWGs were under the leadership of the scientist-instigators with whom the other participating scientists had agreed to work. These SWGs claimed control for more than the collective issues created by the project's basic engineering. But some science activities never entered any SWG's jurisdiction. For one thing, experiment builders, in designing their instruments, always dealt directly with project management about their interfaces with the spacecraft. For another, the contents of journal articles and conference talks were left to individual experiment builders and their teams, even when scientists within a project reached different conclusions about the same topic.
2. The Scope of Flight Center Officials. The project manager, as the person responsible for the project's money and schedule, was the communications hub for technical information and usually the most powerful individual in the project during design and construction. However, the scope of project managers' powers depended partly on whether they had participated in their projects' formative engineering studies and on whether the scientists instigating the projects organized SWGs on their own. Project managers who participated in the early engineering studies usually imposed their flight center's business practices on the project, including the assignment of project staff (variously called "instruments managers" or "payload specialists") to track construction of the scientific instruments. The Pis usually tolerated these customs even when they disliked the flight center's culture or the project manager's style. Project managers and scientists did clash in projects instigated from outside the flight centers. The SWG's broader interests intruded on what was, in other projects, the project manager's domain. Also, scientists at the instigating institution have wanted their own institution's engineers to have de facto power over spacecraft issues. Such conflicts were always mediated or adjudicated without any principals leaving the project.
During mission design and construction, the needs of the project manager determined the project scientist's role. In cases where the SWG dealt with collective science issues within planned boundaries of resources [ISEE and Giotto], the project manager needed the project scientist's guidance on when engineering decisions could upset the scientists' planning. In one case where the SWG incubated conflicting ambitions that the spacecraft could not handle [Voyager], the project manager needed the project scientist to adjudicate conflicts among scientists and mediate between scientists and project management. In cases where the scientists, under the leadership of outsider instigating scientists, enlarged the SWG's responsibilities and diminished the project manager's [Einstein and AMPTE], the project scientist's scope likewise diminished.
Once the spacecraft was constructed and launched, the project manager ceased to be an important communications hub, but the project scientist continued to lead SWG meetings. Scientists used these meetings to compare data and preliminary findings, but never to review or revise one another's prospective publications.
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 minimized interfaces between flight centers, thereby maximizing the project managers' latitude. In both these projects, the SWG operated as an international body to decide how and when to operate the spacecraft in a coordinated fashion.
The one-spacecraft project involving multiple flight centers appears to have caused more stress than any other we studied. The spacecraft parts built by one center had to be jointly integrated with another's, so that technical problems with one threatened to delay progress and increase costs for the other. Following this technical intimacy, the project's science was divided among the parties by granting each blocks of time in which to operate the spacecraft.
4. The Scope of NASA Headquarters Officials. Project managers always described the proper role of headquarters program managers to be handling the project's external relations with the rest of Headquarters and the political institutions that oversee the agency. However, in the projects that were expensive for their time, program managers have not felt comfortable representing the project to powerful outsiders unless they participated in project decision-making. Program scientists became significant only when participating scientists and project managers could not resolve their conflicts.
C. Activities of Experiment Teams
In each case, one scientist, who has usually held the title of principal investigator, has been responsible for overseeing the team that designed and built an experiment. Other team members with independent standing as scientists usually held the title "co-investigator." The significance of the latter title has varied.
1. Origin of Space Experiments. Experimentalists in space science have routinely adopted two strategies for coping with the great technical difficulties they face. First, they have specialized in the design and construction of particular types of instrumentation. Once they have been able to "space qualify" an instrument, rarely do they even consider diversifying into a new area of instrumentation. Second, they have relied on commercially available components and industrial expertise in building their instruments. Because many of their technical problems have military equivalents, space scientists have often been able to adopt or adapt what commercial manufacturers developed for military use.
In the United States, NASA has supported instrumentation development through grants that are administered independently of projects; this has encouraged technical specialization and conservatism in projects. Under grant support, experimentalists were expected to demonstrate they had developed a space-worthy instrument that addressed a generic measurement problem. Only then could they reasonably hope for success with a proposal to build an appropriately tailored version for a particular project.
The military context in which the parts and materials of space instrumentation originated has not noticeably hindered space scientists. Space experimenters have usually been able to buy components as their manufacturers obtained clearance to market them, or to contract with the firms the military services used in order to acquire materials or components they desired.
Even when space scientists developed something technically novel, they did not consider the device suitable for a space project unless or until an industrial firm took up its manufacture. Even then, difficulties in a device's manufacture could discourage a firm or cause a loss of confidence among the members of the experiment team who were waiting for the product. Such problems were cause for helpful intervention on the part of a flight center, which recognized that the viability of a science program depended on the existence of commercial suppliers for specialized components.
New types of space instrumentation resulted from efforts to adapt laboratory apparatus for use in space, and scientists seeking a niche in space experimentation consciously looked for adaptable techniques. The experiments that were part of the projects we studied included four technically aggressive attempts to bring new techniques into space science. Three of these four instances nearly ended in disaster. Their difficulties illustrate why space experimentalists work within an instrumentation niche and rarely venture into new technical areas.
2. Organization of Experiment Teams. Experiment teams have usually had a center-periphery structure. At the center has been a small number of institutions overseeing hardware development and data-processing software. On the periphery have been institutions that provide additional expertise in the science analysis of the data. Thus teams have sought to centralize "craft" knowledge of their instrumentation without wasting data on experimentalists who lack sufficient breadth to recognize all the ways the data could be used.
In the projects managed by NASA alone, each PI's institution built its instrument without help from other scientific institutions. Co-investigators were chiefly of symbolic importance, demonstrating that outsiders believed in the scientific value of a proposed experiment. By contrast, on international projects, more than half of the experiment teams divided responsibilities for building their instruments among institutions from different nations. By breaking the instrument down into self-contained boxes that interfaced with little complexity, these teams minimized their burden of self-coordination. Thus the term "co-investigator" in these missions could refer either to scientists who boosted the experiment's scientific breadth and credibility or to scientists who actually contributed part of the instrument.
3. Organization of Data Acquisition and Analysis. Individual experiment teams were usually unified over what data to collect and how to process them. SWG discussions were used to resolve conflicts among teams over data acquisition. In general, projects provided neither technical nor moral supports, nor impediments, for experiment teams to share data with one another or to help non-participants who were interested in the data. Teams in the projects that formed outside the flight centers were more inclined to treat their data as public property. To fulfill their ambitions to redirect a sub-community's attention or to create a new sub-community, these scientists needed to enable their peers to convince themselves of the data's value.
Experiment teams have striven for
self-sufficiency in their ability to perform scientific analyses. However, they
were only occasionally able to achieve this scientific independence. In most
cases, experiment teams found their way more or less easily to exchanges of
processed data, with the
understanding that the borrowing scientists would have the lending principal
investigator check the borrower's work if the borrowed data were to be used
in a publication. The ease with which errors slipped into data analyses has
helped to keep borrowers "good citizens" when dealing with lenders.
4. Dissemination of Results. PIs in a project always judged the content of their teams' publications independently of one another. They usually decided independently on the time and place of journal submissions (except when planning joint submissions for a special issue of a journal). Open differences in interpretation of data from the same project and even the same experiment within a project have been considered normal. Author lists never became long enough to force either teams or projects to impose a policy on authorship.
D. Internationalism in Space Science
Space projects have been international at two levels. Projects have aggregated and coordinated the efforts of flight centers in multiple nations. And experiments have been built by multi-national teams of scientists and engineers.
1. Internationalism in Projects. Four forces were responsible for making projects international: the desire to combine technical specialties that had become better developed in different countries; the desire to broaden and diversify the base of scientists competing to participate in a project; the desire to spread the costs of the project across governments; and the desire to use a quasi-diplomatic agreement to make projects more difficult to cancel. Different forces were more important in different types of projects. The projects we studied that formed in flight centers, which mobilized extant sub-communities of scientists, internationalized to broaden the scientific base and to increase the commitments of governments. The projects that formed outside the flight centers, whose appeal lay in their potential to redirect a sub-community's attention or to create a new sub-community, internationalized to spread costs and to obtain needed expertise.
The most important difficulties in these international projects were managerial. The projects could not shift personnel across national borders in response to problems or delays, so that people in one nation had to wait for the other's work. Scientists in international projects were accustomed to their individual nations' policies for managing and archiving data, so that some expectations were in jeopardy in discussions of a project policy for data management. National differences in organization and culture were apparent to project participants, but they never prevented coordination.
2. Internationalism in Experiments. As was the case on the project level, internationalization on the experiment level had the advantage of spreading the costs of an experiment across governments, but only if multiple institutions contribute interdependent parts. Political expediency often compensated the difficulties of this arrangement-e.g., a team could propose its experiment for a NASA project with an American PI and for an ESA project with a European PI. Within Europe, the national funding of experiments for ESA projects stimulated experiment teams to internationalize as a way to guard against funding problems in the PI's nation.
E. Space Science Careers and Space Science Projects
Because space scientists have not comprised a discipline unto themselves, their accomplishments have been judged in comparison with ground-based observers and laboratory experimenters with more secure sources of data. The riskiness of space science careers seems to be intensifying, for the length of time needed to prepare space projects for launch has been increasing and the number of flight opportunities has been decreasing.
Instrument designers, especially those at universities, worry that graduate students find space-based hardware projects too long and risky a route to an advanced degree. Of the graduate students we interviewed, only one had tried to pursue a hardware project, and all were making their careers on their ability to extract important measurements from data generated by instruments they had not helped to build.
By contrast, scientists have prospered in academic niches, without designing hardware, when they have been able to learn enough about an instrument to use it with sophistication. They envision a future in which scientists at many institutions can work on data from instruments built at a few institutions. In their eyes, specialization between instrumentalists and data-analyzers encourages the diverse talents needed to advance space science.
Values and interests shared by the two groups seem likely to prevent internecine conflict. Most scientists assume that an excellent instrument makes possible a multitude of measurements. And most assume that experiment teams concentrate on skimming the straightforward results from their individual instruments in order to build a record to justify their next proposals. Instrument designers pragmatically conclude that their self-interest, as well as duty to the community, obliges them to welcome extra-mural users interested in using their data for topics that the instrument designers are not pursuing.
III. HISTORICAL - SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: GEOPHYSICS [Back to Top]
This essay serves two purposes. First, it introduces concepts for characterizing those aspects of multi-institutional collaborations in geophysics that are most important to generating or locating documents of likely interest to historians of science and technology. Second, it offers observations on where the organizational framework of the government-funded, multi-institutional collaboration may affect the social relations and careers that are necessary for the pursuit of scientific research.
The structure of the essay is built around its central finding. The projects we studied clustered around one of two types, which we call "technique-importing" and "technique-aggregating" projects. Three of the eight projects sought to import and adapt techniques for academic geophysics, expensive techniques that had proven their mettle in industrial field work or other scientific areas. The other five sought to aggregate a number of evolving geophysical techniques, in order to study a site that offered a strategic window into poorly understood processes or a global phenomenon that outstripped the resources of any individual institution to capture. Part One below describes common features and the most important distinctions between the two types of geophysics projects in terms of their formation, their organization and management, and the activities of their experiment teams. Part Two uses the same categories to describe the common features and variabilities for the projects of each type. Part Three gives observations on internationalism and on careers in geophysics.
PART ONE: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GEOPHYSICS PROJECTS [Back to Top]
A. Formation and Funding
Most of our selected projects formed because scientists at geophysical research institutes perceived opportunities that required more resources or inspired more interest than could be channeled through their home institutions. The projects were all self-organized, for geophysicists have not had institutions where scientists and engineers routinely defined projects for the broader community to carry out. To obtain the engineering advice they needed to plan projects, geophysicists have relied on personal contacts with scientists who had previously worked for industry, or with engineers who worked in research institutes, or with scientists who had acquired logistical experience in previous research.
The National Science Foundation was the principal agency that would-be instigators of multi-institutional projects hoped to convince of the value of their plans. That does not necessarily mean that the NSF has been equally prominent in geophysics generally, but multi-institutional geophysics projects have been so expensive and so oriented to the concerns of university scientists that usually the NSF seemed the appropriate agency.
The NSF was the initial and sole funding source for all three technique-importing projects. When forming technique-importing projects, instigators sensed they had to overcome their institutional rivalries to create a consensus proposal. Otherwise, they risked submitting competing proposals that could give NSF officials the impression that geophysicists disagreed over the goals or strategy of importing a technique. In all cases, the instigators proposed consortia to manage the project. A consortium structure enabled the instigators to vest sufficient authority in a headquarters institution to simplify project administration, while preventing that institution from dominating by placing substantive policy-making powers in committees whose members were drawn from various institutions. The NSF responded with "block grants" that removed it from intra-project governance.
When forming technique-aggregating
projects, instigators and would-be participants sensed they had to strike a
balance between optimizing data-collecting conditions for a few experiments
and attracting enough experimentalists to demonstrate general interest in the
project. Workshops were the usual forum in which scientists sought a high yet
manageable level of interest in a project. The NSF was prominent but not dominant
in the technique-aggregating projects. We found cases where possible experiments
that seemed marginal by the NSF's criteria were vital by
another agency's criteria [WOCE], or where the collection of possible experiments
made the project appealing to the science agencies of several governments [ISCCP
and WOCE], or where the collection of experiments made the total project relevant
to operational responsibilities of other government agencies [Parkfield]. Regardless
of the agencies involved, funding for technique-aggregating projects was structured
as a collection of individual grants to several principal investigators (PIs)
with one PI taking the additional responsibility of directing a science management
office (SMO).
B. Organization and Management
In the technique-importing projects, participants commonly spoke of "consortia" of institutions that were responsible for appointing standing committees, which advised or directed project executives, who created the organizational environment for researchers. In the technique-aggregating projects, participants commonly spoke of Science Working Groups (SWGs), comprised of the project's PIs, and SMOs, funded to coordinate logistics for all the PIs but located at the institution and under the direction of one of the PIs.
The headquarters institutions for consortia and the SMOs all served as communication "hubs," but their relations with "spoke" institutions were very different. Consortium headquarters absorbed information from their spokes, for adapting and operating the sophisticated communal resources of a technique-importing project required the hub personnel to know the needs of spoke researchers. Spoke scientists contributed well-heeded advice, but did not have responsibilities that required them to become large consumers of project information. By contrast, technique-aggregating projects had information-absorbing spokes that used hubs chiefly to transmit the information that they needed to understand one another's logistical needs and desires. Hub scientists in such projects were responsible for spotting possible problems, but they did not need to become versed in the methodologies of the several experiments.
C. Activities of Experiment Teams
The term "experiment," in the context of technique-aggregating projects, consistently refers to the activities that PIs oversee in order to produce data and findings. Usually PIs' teams have consisted of people from their own institutions, and usually PIs have either taken their data-acquiring equipment into the field or brought back samples from the field for laboratory analysis. "PI" in the context of technique-importing projects could reasonably be used for each researcher, who independently qualifies to be part of a research party, but we will use PI to refer to a research party's designated leaders, who oversee the use of the equipment the project provides. Equating these leaders with PIs and the party members with team members reflects the level of initiative and intellectual investment among participants in the two types of projects.
Teams, not projects, have been the source of scientific results. Technique-importing projects have wanted or required PIs of experiment teams to produce a general paper, with other team members as authors, for publication shortly after data acquisition. Technique-aggregating projects usually arranged for special sessions at conferences or special issues of journals to present project results. Otherwise, publishing in scientific journals and delivering papers at conferences have been left to individual initiative. Disputes over how to interpret data have not been regulated within projects or teams but become part of the public record. Author lists never became long enough to force either teams or projects to impose a policy on authorship.
PART TWO: CHARACTERISTICS OF EACH TYPE OF PROJECT [Back to Top]
A. Technique-Importing Projects
1. Formation and Funding of Technique-Importing Projects. The origins
of our technique-importing projects invariably created endemic tension over
where to locate managerial responsibility for the project, because the instigators
had to unite behind a single proposal and because they always thought the technique
would best be imported by making one institution responsible for project administration.
To resolve the tensions, mid-project change in the lead institution, creation
of a new, freestanding institution, and capitulation to the institution with
the best industrial contacts have all been tried.
The proposals for technique-importing projects were always out of scale for the norms of the particular NSF division handling them, and the block grants the proposers requested were a departure from the individual grants the NSF normally awarded. NSF program managers told us that National Academy of Sciences endorsements were important for convincing their administrative superiors of the value of the proposals.
Successes in acquiring data have stimulated jealousies in non-participating institutions. In two of the three projects we studied, the consortia expanded their membership. In one case where project administrators resisted outsiders' interests [COCORP], the NSF pressured them to propose site-specific studies in cooperation with others interested in that site.
2. Organization and Management of Technique-Importing Projects. All consortia used "standing committees" to review or formulate policy for the major aspects of the project. They vested consortium governance in an "executive committee" of representatives of member institutions. Daily administration of project activities was handled by project executives, with a scientist as chief and staff that included engineers or former industrial scientists.
a. Scope of Consortium Standing Committees. The standing committees have tackled the issues that are most important from a historical point of view. Most significant has been their role in research planning: in all cases, it was standing committees that decided whether and when to apply the technique to a particular target. They have also been forums for debating the general designs and specifications for the major pieces of instrumentation, and for keeping academic scientists abreast of the latest in relevant industrial techniques. Though sometimes controversial, standing committee decisions appear never to have been challenged as illegitimate.
b. Scope of Consortium Executive Committees. Executive committees were always important at the inception of our technique-importing projects because they established project boundaries and ground rules. Following inception, their importance has varied. In one consortium that monopolized the research instruments [DSDP], the executive committee occasionally had to decide issues that split a standing committee; it also decided when to seek more consortium members and the capital they would bring the project. In a consortium that contracted out for the design and construction of instrumentation [IRIS], the Executive Committee remained important for adjudicating splits within and between standing committees, but could be passive about consortium membership. In a consortium that contracted out data-acquisition to firms that were already serving industrial clients [COCORP], the Executive Committee disintegrated for lack of meaningful labor.
c. Scope of Project Staff. Each technique-importing project we studied had a geophysicist as its chief administrator, and the chief administrator hired engineers or scientists, who were responsible for providing technical services to research scientists. The importance of project staff roles varied.
Project staff held administrative but not intellectual authority in the project that monopolized the research instruments [DSDP]. Intellectual authority resided with the standing committees and PIs. But the chief administrator had power of approval over who would serve on research parties, and a staff scientist accompanied each party to insure that project regulations for acquiring and reporting data were followed. The chief administrator and staff had both intellectual and administrative power in the case where a consortium contracted with firms to acquire data [COCORP]. The administrators picked the scientist who would oversee the contractor's operations, and the staff, who were expert in identifying technically attractive research targets, specified how the contractor should acquire data. In the case where a consortium contracted for acquisition of instruments made to its specifications [IRIS], the chief administrator had little intellectual or administrative power, but the staff did. In this case, the staff worked with standing committees to set specifications and to pick contractors; the chief administrator did little for internal project management once the project staff were ensconced.
d. Scope of Funding Agency. NSF personnel were important in defining the terms of consortium formation. After that, so long as any consortium could settle its issues without asking for additional money, the NSF's program managers were passive towards intra-consortium issues.
3. Activities of Experiment Teams in Technique-Importing Projects.
a. Origins of Experiments. The consortia's standing committees and subcommittees were the most common and important forums for discussions of possible experiments. Initially, the brainstorming of the enthusiasts for the project was sufficient to set in motion the arrangements for performing an experiment. Overtime, as early research targets were successfully examined, demands to investigate other targets proliferated, technical failure became less tolerable, and the standing committees had to formalize selection of research targets.
The myriad interests of scientists in particular research subjects and processes have kept some technique-importing projects viable for decades. The projects have not needed strong research and development groups to inspire experimenters, and have relied on staff engineers to keep the project's equipment abreast of the state of the art in industry.
b. Organization of Experiment Teams in Technique-Importing Projects. The structure of experiment teams was diverse. The project that monopolized a facility [DSDP] picked leaders for the experiment team, established a template of roles for experiment team members to fill, and set up formal application procedures for prospective team members. Both leaders and team members felt constrained to follow the data-acquisition plans sanctioned by the project, except when field conditions or equipment failure forced changes. The project that contracted out for data-acquisition services to private firms [COCORP] needed only a few scientists, whom they designated from the project's staff, to design and supervise data-acquisition. Such "teams" were too small to have any noteworthy structure beyond designation of a leader. The project that bought large number of instruments built to its specifications [IRIS] relied on external scientists to form their own teams on the basis of their "know-who" of researchers with compatible interests.
All three projects assumed responsibility for archiving data and curating samples for use by the greater scientific community.
c. Organization for Data Acquisition and Analysis in Technique-Importing Projects. In all experiments within our technique-importing projects, only team leaders could hope to influence strategy for data acquisition; team members lived with the decisions of the leaders and standing committees. Team members always distributed their individually collected data streams to one another, and they always had temporary privileged use of the experiment's data. The leaders were responsible for mediating among members where interests were similar enough to spawn duplication of labor or destructive competition.
B. Technique-Aggregating Projects
1. Formation and Funding of Technique-Aggregating Projects. Instigators of technique-aggregating projects were motivated by dissatisfaction with the scale, site, or level of organization of their previous research. They used workshops to attract enough scientists to demonstrate general interest, but not so many as to make discussions unwieldy. The workshop participants would ideally agree on an outline and justification for a project and determine who would be responsible for coordinating proposal writing and for proposing an SMO to see to project administration. The funding agency then decided which, if any, of the proposed measurements to support.
In practice, the breadth or expense of technique-aggregating proposals made them difficult for funding agencies to accept. Proposals to aggregate a wide breadth of techniques attracted peer reviews that judged individual experiments as contributions to the proposer's specialty rather than to the other experiments. Proposals to aggregate a set of techniques expensive relative to a program manager's usual budget created pressure to develop new programmatic contexts. Instigators of projects that were both too broad and too expensive for their usual programs had to develop an interagency framework.
2. Organization and Management of Technique-Aggregating Projects. As a method of organizing technique-aggregating projects, using science management offices to oversee SWGs of independent PIs seems ingrained in geophysicists' culture. No interviewee spoke of any one SMO as modeled on a previous one, but all the projects adopted and adapted this organizational form.
a. Scope of Science Working Groups. Science Working Groups continued the discussions of the formative workshops, with membership restricted to those PIs (and their designees) whom the funding agency selected. In all cases, participating scientists needed to reach a consensus on how to handle collective issues that were embedded in a project's basic design-e.g., scientists sharing oceanographic research vessels had to agree on the track the vessels would take. Rarely have participating scientists agreed to an SWG that went beyond managing what was intrinsically collective to the projects. An SWG was never called on to adjudicate scientific disputes among partici- pants, never regulated the content of scientific papers, and never successfully produced a scientific paper with project-wide authorship.
b. Scope of Science Management Offices. Because the several funding agencies that supported technique-aggregating projects had different traditions, the scope of the SMO's authority and jurisdiction have varied significantly. The projects we studied included an instance in which the funding agency left the SMO with next to nothing to manage [Parkfield], one in which the funding agency made the SMO's PI a (benevolent) despot for the project [ISCCP], and one in which the funding agency made the SMO an active filter between participants and the agency [WOCE].
SMOs were busiest when project logistics were demanding. However, logistics were only deemed intellectually significant in oceanographic projects, because planning where research vessels would go, how long they would stay there, and who could dangle how much apparatus in the water determined what data sets the PIs could hope to create. Social and scientific success were best secured when a project's SMO had a mandate from participants to draft detailed plans for collective discussion. SMO personnel have also frequently created project-wide data bases and organized post-field-work SWG meetings for discussions of data streams. In almost all instances, however, a scientist who wanted to publish work based on another's data would consult the data collector; SMO staff have not actively brokered relationships among scientists.
c. Scope of Funding Agencies. Funding agencies have usually left project participants to govern themselves. Agency program managers became activists only to impose a longer-term perspective over a project that was developing resources with post-project utility. This situation has been a prescription for difficulties. PIs in such projects have been resentful of what they felt was micro-management by Washington or an improper diminution of their rightful authority over the project. Program managers nevertheless felt obliged to manage directly what they considered "a community-wide kind of operation."
3. Activities of Experiment Teams in Technique-Aggregating Projects. Experiment teams in technique-aggregating projects have usually been single-institution groups consisting of a PI and the assistants the institution and grants can support. They are usually bound by the PI's virtuosity in a form of measurement. The goal of each team has been to show that its form of measurement captures large-scale forces of theoretical or practical significance.
a. Origins of Experiments. Would-be PIs in technique-aggregating projects have faced three inter-related technical difficulties. First, they strove for efficiency and user-friendliness in data acquisition in order to be less burdensome on a project's communal resources and thus be more welcome as participants. Second, they strove for efficiency in data processing to increase their potential responsiveness to other PIs. And third, they strove to make their equipment operate reliably in the field.
Geophysicists have employed combinations of four strategies to cope with these difficulties. Some relied on data taken from instruments that others operated for other interests and concentrated on processing the data for use in geophysics. Some used standardized or communal instrumentation that was serviced by technicians who worked with all PIs funded to take data. Those with a taste for engineering built the personal and institutional relationships they needed to design and construct equipment that improved their measuring powers. Finally, some purchased commercial analytic apparatus and customized the apparatus for geophysical use. All the participants in the projects we studied had strongly specialized in particular types of measurements, but those who used standardized techniques appear to have had the most opportunity to "poach" on other specialists' turf.
The use of others' instrumentation has eliminated immediate technical problems and served to broaden the range of geophysical techniques, but at the cost of working with less-than-optimal data. Standardizing or collectivizing techniques has improved the efficiency with which common or expensive measurements can be taken, but at the cost of forcing the PIs to overcome the problem of reduction in autonomy. PIs were willing to take on the risks of developing their own instrumentation when they sensed their instrument could address a measurement problem of generic importance for geophysics; they built the instrumentation independently of any data-gathering projects and used projects to debut, refine, or better deploy what they had already developed. PIs who used commercial analytic instrumentation limited themselves to determining concentrations of a small number of substances but with the benefit of being able to handle samples from a variety of sources.
b. Organization of Experiment Teams. Experiment teams in these projects rarely had an elaborate structure. In nearly every case, the PI was just that, not the broker of arrangements among several independent investigators. Teams were usually small enough to be in one institution. There were two types of exception to the single-institution team. First, PIs building instrumentation often had close working relations with a company that could produce and capitalize on the scientists' instrumentation ideas. Second, young scientists or scientists with an innovative experiment, seeking to improve their chances for a spot in a project, often proposed combining their ambitions with the conventional measurements of better established scientists at another institution.
c. Organization of Data Acquisition and Analysis. The strategy for data acquisition was usually a collective issue that was settled in the SWG, where PIs represented the interests of their teams. Most of the social conflicts in technique-aggregating projects have their foundation in policies for sharing data within a project and with outsiders. Experimenters have had the easiest time with one another in projects where everyone's data were digital at the time of acquisition. These projects, however, have had difficulties with outside users. By looking for hard-to-detect signals that experimenters shunned as too difficult to be worth immediate extraction, outside users could put participants in the position of criticizing the reliability of claims made on the basis of their own data. Projects that mixed digital and sampled raw data were, predictably, most difficult; they have worked well only when digital data-takers have been willing to share their data in advance of sample-takers' ability to reciprocate, and when sample-takers have subsequently both reciprocated and welcomed "poaching" by digital data-takers.
In almost all cases, discussions between teams of data started with assessing how geophysical parameters could be calculated from processed measurements; participants rarely cared to question how each accounted for any noise in their raw data. In a few instances PIs in the same project became embroiled in methodological disputes because they reached different values for a parameter by different techniques. These disputes were settled (or not) without mediation from other project participants.
PART THREE: CHARACTERISTICS OF GEOPHYSICS PROJECTS IN FUNCTIONAL CONTEXT [Back to Top]
A. Internationalism in Geophysics Projects
Several forces encouraged internationalism in the projects we studied. The most important has been a combination of moral imperative and political necessity for putting the study of global processes on an international footing. Other factors favoring internationalism were the desire to spread project costs across governments and to broaden the expertise available to a project. Technique-importing projects all originated domestically and became more or less internationalized depending on how powerful the forces for internationalization were vis āvis the desire of project administrators to keep management in familiar hands. The forces for internationalization combined most potently in technique-aggregating projects that investigated global processes and were least present in site-specific technique-aggregating projects.
1. Arrangements for Internationalism in Technique-Importing Projects. For administrators of technique-importing projects, two factors together determined where the balance in the conflicting impulses for internationalization fell: the means by which the consortia acquired and managed the technique for acquiring data, and the labor-intensiveness of analyzing the data. The more expensive and rare the means for acquiring data, the greater the incentive for the United States to share costs, the greater the value to other nations of joining in on what the Americans had started, and the easier for Americans to negotiate terms that preserved what they considered proper management for the project. The more labor-intensive the post-acquisition analysis of data, the harder for American scientists to keep pace with the rate of data collection, and the easier for them to share data-collecting privileges with other nations' scientists. At one extreme, an expensive, highly labor-intensive project formally internationalized at the cost of adopting rules to insure equity in the use of the technique [DSDP]; at the other, a consortium that contracted out for data acquisition and kept up with the scientific processing of its data has done no more than participate in international conferences relating to the technique [COCORP].
2. Arrangements for Internationalism in Technique-Aggregating Projects. Workshops sponsored by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) appear to have been effective at spawning projects to study global processes. The leaders of successful workshops became proto-executive committees for proto-science working groups. The ICSU and the WMO have together created program offices to which nations have "seconded" scientists to direct international SMOs.
The major weakness of this system is that WMO and ICSU only have funds for meetings and project administration. The scientists in the proto-working group had to convince their national academies to support the project through ICSU and press their national funding agencies to provide resources. Projects have been handicapped by national governments that were unwilling to participate or that would not modify their national research priorities to achieve a better international project.
B. Geophysics Careers and Geophysics Projects
The geophysics projects we studied were based on individuals pursuing three types of careers. First, obviously, geophysics projects needed scientists who desired research opportunities that only a multi-institutional project could support. Second, projects used geophysicists in administrative positions at funding agencies to politick for projects. Third, projects needed engineers or industrial scientists who were willing to work for a project-supported institution rather than a for-profit business.
Of the 61 American geophysicists we interviewed because of their participation as researchers in our projects, roughly half either held non-teaching university appointments or performed their research at research institutes that were not part of a university department. It seems that geophysical specialists often rely on grants for part of their salaries. The pressure to keep raising money probably accounts for the tendency of geophysicists to specialize in a particular kind of measurement{5}, because through specialization a geophysicist can maintain competitiveness for the use of the instrumentation of a technique-importing project or for a slot in a technique-aggregating project. For scientists trying to build careers by creating new geophysical measuring techniques, inclusion in technique-aggregating projects has been a cherished sign that they and their technique had "arrived" as part of the panoply of accepted geophysical measurements.
Longer projects have been a mixed social blessing for geophysicists. Long technique-aggregating projects provided participants welcome relief from fund raising. But they did not generate the steady stream of data sets needed for supporting dissertation writers or avoiding gaps in a publication record. Technique-importing projects, which have endured if successful, often needed staff research scientists to help with the use of project instrumentation; our information is sparse, but such positions have at least sometimes been viewed as good science-career launchers. However, the careers of research scientists from outside the project proper benefitted only if they had sustainable rights to operate the instrumentation. The most widely popular project we studied was one that acquired and then loaned instruments to outside users [IRIS].
In our sample of cases, experienced, career research administrators at Federal agencies loom large. All the technique-importing projects and six of the eight technique-aggregating projects originated under the aegis of a career program manager. Two of these projects [WOCE and Parkfield], in the eyes of some interviewees, had administrative problems that prevented participants from achieving their full scientific potential: one originated under an agency program manager who was not a career research administrator and the other originated under a career program manager but in an agency that was overwhelmingly dedicated to in-house projects. Though any solid conclusion would require at least a comparison of successful with failed projects, it seems no accident that our case studies (all successes) were largely shepherded through by program managers who left research permanently for administration in Federal agencies with strong extramural research programs.
The most important source of industrial expertise for geophysics projects has probably been veterans of failed start-up companies, who were happy to leave entrepreneurship to work for a stable salary. The only projects that made do without engineering help were ones that processed data that were already being collected for other purposes.
IV. ARCHIVAL ANALYSIS AND APPRAISAL GUIDELINES [Back to Top]
The historical analysis summarized above described the patterns of organization of multi-institutional collaborations and the activities they employed to carry out those functions. The following archival analysis couples these to the patterns of records creation, retention and destruction, and likely locations of records. In addition, we offer appraisal guidelines for the records of multi-institutional collaborations in space science and geophysics. These guidelines are based on interviews and other discussions with scientists, administrators, and archivists; prior appraisal experience of the AIP Center; and review by the project's Working Group. In particular, we identified "core" records to be preserved for all major collaborations. We also reviewed archival programs and records-keeping activities at the National Academy of Sciences, Federal agencies, universities, research institutes, and government-contract laboratories, and developed a set of recommendations to promote preservation of valuable documentation.
In all multi-institutional collaborations, some types of records are created by necessity: proposals, designs of instruments, purchase requisitions, logbooks of data acquisition, data analysis records, and progress and final narrative and financial reports. In addition to these operational records, collaborations usually create minutes and reports of committees and sub-committees. Our interviews with individual scientists show that decisions to create these records to a large extent reflect the style and personal inclinations of individuals. This is particularly the case for their own notebooks and files. Particular circumstances affect the creation or retention of valuable documentation. These include the degree of centralization of the collaboration, the emergence of fax and electronic mail, and the role of engineers.
We continue to accumulate evidence that a major obstacle in documenting multi-institutional collaborations is the lack of archival programs at some critical institutions. Even where archival programs exist, administrators at universities, research institutes, and Federal laboratories seldom view the documentation of collaborations, no matter how significant, as their responsibility.
A. Space Science
1. Records Created and Retained. In the field of large space science
collaborations in the United States, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) is virtually the only player. Not only does NASA provide the funding
for space science experiments, it provides the institutional structure for the
project through its flight centers. Space science projects have formal record-keeping
requirements related to this bureaucratic structure. Also, since the individual
instruments that participating scientists create have to be integrated into
a single spacecraft, considerable formally documented interaction between flight
centers and the experiment teams is required. 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.
Under the bureaucratic structure imposed by NASA, certain offices are held responsible for aspects of projects and are expected to create specific categories of records. Thus records are created almost regardless of the circumstances of a particular instrument (such as number of member institutions and geographical distribution).
Original ideas for specific projects, no matter how or where they are developed, pass through the relevant NASA Headquarters discipline scientist and a working group of external and internal scientists. This group focuses the needs of the discipline into actual projects. Following this initial project definition, the review process continues upward through the NASA hierarchy to either the Associate Administrator for Space Science (for the selection of "Explorer-class" projects) or the NASA Administrator (for the selection of projects of a larger scale). The minutes and reports from all levels of review are important for their insight into the project's development.
As projects are approved and receive funding, the focus of management moves from a headquarters program manager to a project manager at a flight center, while the focus of science management moves from a headquarters program scientist to a project scientist at the managing flight center. The project manager's records provide planning, administrative, technical, and budgetary documentation up to the time of launch. The records of project scientists are especially important for their value in documenting the decision-making process of the project's Science Working Group (made up of principal investigators (PIs) and team members for each of the instruments on board). This group establishes the details of the scientific strategy for its particular project. These details may include choosing spacecraft trajectories, solving instrument interference, deciding the scientific topics to be addressed, or establishing priorities for the use of the instruments during the mission. All these functions at both Headquarters and the space flight centers need to be documented to preserve an adequate historical record of space science projects.
The records of individual PIs are restricted largely to the construction of their own particular instruments. In cases where space science projects were instigated from outside NASA and led by one or a few PIs, these individuals were found to have important additional documentation pertaining to the development of that particular mission. The majority of space science principal investigators are located in academia, and those we interviewed said that they had filed project records in with their professional records. Professional papers of space scientists with distinguished careers would qualify for acceptance by most academic repositories, following well-established procedures.
Scientific data constitutes a separate category. At the conclusion of a project, investigators in the United States are required to place their data in the National Space Data Center in a form useable by other scientists. This practice substantiates the long-term value of this type of data.
2. Location of Records. Our site visits and interviews show that the main locations of records of our selected projects in the United States are at the National Academy of Sciences (in its Space Studies Board-formerly Space Science Board-records) and in the hands of discipline scientists (later program scientists) and program managers at NASA Headquarters, project scientists and project managers at NASA flight centers, and PIs.
In ESA projects, project managers and project scientists at ESTEC (the European Space Research and Technology Centre) and PIs at universities and research institutes generate records similar to those of their United States counterparts. However, it is working groups of ESA's Science Program Committee, not the national academies of the several nations, that generate the records most similar to the United States National Academy of Sciences and the NASA discipline scientists. Additionally, government funding agencies of the several nations involved in each mission independently pass judgement on proposals to build experiments for ESA projects.
The majority of the archival questionnaires stated that the records of the Science Working Group are probably the best location for information concerning scientific aspects of a project. These materials are normally located with the project scientist, who chairs this group of PIs; some PIs mentioned they had copies.
3. Guidelines for the Appraisal of Records. The purpose of the following appraisal guidelines is to identify the kinds of evidence needed to provide adequate documentation of all major collaborative projects in space science. Because the trend in space science collaborations during the period of the AIP Study (from the early 1970s to the near present) has been toward larger, longer, and fewer projects-each one very expensive and of high scientific significance-we have felt no need to offer guidelines for singling out special projects. We recommend that at least a core of documentation be saved for all multi-institutional space science collaborations.
Our investigations located a small number of categories of records that taken as a whole provide basic evidence of the process of collaborative research for virtually every project. For any one project these core records are located at several settings, including the National Academy of Sciences and NASA and ESA headquarters and flight centers.
The core records for space science collaborations would include, in the United States: records of the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board; at NASA, the Office of Space Science's strategic planning records, the records of the discipline/program scientist and program manager, along with their respective advisory groups; and at NASA flight centers, the records of both the project manager and project scientist, along with the Science Working Group (SWG); also, records of the instruments manager, where the position exists{6}. Core records for space science in Europe would include: records of the European Space Science Foundation; at ESA, the records of the Science Policy Council, the Science Program Committee, and the Solar System and Astronomy Working Groups; and at ESTEC (ESA's flight center), records of the project manager and project scientists, along with the SWG; also, the records of the payload specialist{7}. Except for unusual circumstances, records of positions below instruments manager or payload specialist need not be saved. There will be occasional, almost random, cases where someone associated with a project has tried to save detailed documentation at a lower level. These opportunities can be exploited to preserve a sampling of documentation of operations-level activity.
Additional documentation should be provided (outside the Federal milieu) by saving professional papers of distinguished scientists who have carried out research in space science.
4. Current Institutional Archival Practices. Institutional archival policies are key to the preservation of documentation. In our six case studies, almost two-thirds of the participants interviewed worked at government agencies. We address archival practices at the main settings, NASA and ESA with their flight centers.
The records created by NASA and its flight centers are considered to be Federal in ownership. NASA has a new records schedule currently under review at the National Archives. This schedule changes NASA records management procedures from subject-oriented to function-oriented. Although this change should be for the better, NASA's flight centers have always felt entitled to interpret the records schedules to best fit the particular character of their center. Not only is there a justified feeling of individuality in the flight centers, but the extent of their records management programs varies. One center's program has one half-time employee while another has a full archival program employing two professional archivists. No matter how complete a records schedule is, its implementation is as important as the schedule itself. Although space projects generate substantial documentation, we found many cases of mismanagement of records, even for those categories of records NASA has scheduled for permanent retention.
In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board is charged with developing broad ideas for areas of study that NASA should be investigating. The Academy has had an excellent archival program for decades. Such an external advisory structure does not seem to exist formally for the European Space Agency. The European Space Science Foundation's European Space Science Committee hopes to fill the role of an external advisory committee, but has yet to be a major influence. ESA's own Science Program Committee generates records most similar to the NAS's Space Studies Board and NASA's discipline scientists. In recent years, ESA has transferred its inactive records to the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
5. Conclusion. Although the bureaucratic structure of space science projects requires the creation of documentation, it is not necessarily preserved. This lack of security for the records of space science projects is in part due to the need for more systematic implementation of records management procedures at NASA and its flight centers. These are Federal records that should be eventually transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration.
B. Geophysics and Oceanography
1. Records Created and Retained. All of the geophysics and oceanographic
projects we studied were funded by Federal funding agencies and subject to the
reporting requirements of an agency. Federal agencies are required to retain
successful proposal files, including the proposals and budget requests, peer
and panel reviews, and progress and final narrative and fiscal reports. Because
of these requirements, a bare bones minimum documentation-far less than desirable-of
these projects does exist at the Federal funding agencies (and later at the
National Archives).
The different administrative structures for the two types of geophysics projects, technique-importing and technique-aggregating, provide distinct challenges to documenting them. The consortia that manage technique-importing collaborations often develop as free-standing or geographically shifting institutions with no permanent ties to more stable institutions. Records of archival value created by these types of projects include: records of a standing committee and its subcommittees, such as minutes and reports; executive committee records; records of project executives (who could either be scientists or engineers) and records of the administrative head of the consortium (chief scientist, director, president, etc.); and, for oceanographic projects, ship logs. The consortia which develop new freestanding institutions or move geographically do not have an obvious repository in which to deposit their materials. In these situations, we recommend that valuable project documentation be offered to the National Archives.
For technique-aggregating projects, the science management offices (SMOs), which typically see to the logistics, have always been located at the institution of one of the PIs. Valuable records created by these projects include: records of preliminary workshops; records of the project's SWG, including minutes of meetings and reports; records of advisory committees; and records of the SMO's administrator. Little thought has been given to planning for the long-term retention of the records of these collaborations. We recommend that records of archival quality would best be deposited at the host institution of the SMO.
Technique-aggregating projects that deal with geophysical processes on a global scale have an international SMO in addition to SMOs for participating nations. The international SMOs are under the aegis of such organizations as the International Council of Scientific Unions or the World Meteorological Organization. Each of these organizations has archives.
Papers of PIs are prime locations for documentation of a number of topics. These include details of staffing of the project team, plans for data gathering and analysis, use of the data by team members and others on the project, publications based on the data, and correspondence and other communication with team members. Decisions to archive papers of scientists who have served as PIs or members of their teams for projects in geophysics and oceanography should be made on the basis of their overall careers by archivists at their home institutions (which, in our case studies, were almost two-thirds academic). If scientists have regularly led or participated in important research, the records of their participation are worth saving.
In the cases AIP studied, it may not always have been mandatory for individual investigators to deposit their scientific data into data archives. By and large, the trend is for more stringent requirements. In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the largest holder of geoscience data in its numerous facilities across the country.
2. Location of Records. The main locations of records are at policy-making bodies (e.g., the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and-at the international level-at the International Council of Scientific Unions and the World Meteorological Organization), at national funding agencies, in the hands of administrators and selected staff at science management offices or consortium headquarters, and in the files of PIs of projects.
Our interview subjects told us in their questionnaires that the SMOs and the consortium headquarters were the best locations for the records of geophysics projects. SMOs provide the likely locations for records of project administrators and working groups and their executive committees. Similarly, consortium headquarters provide the location of the records of the project's chief scientists (director, president, etc.), its standing committee (and, perhaps, subcommittees), and its executive committee. Other key players at consortium headquarters are staff scientists who work with each scientific party. For example, in the Ocean Drilling Program, one of the staff scientists assists the co-chief scientists with the selection of the scientific party and the planning of a given leg; the staff scientist also goes aboard ship to help administer the leg. 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.
PIs generally retain some records of their involvement with the collaboration. The majority of the PIs we interviewed in our geophysics and oceanography projects stated that they had project records included in their professional files.
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 was collected. These logs are often considered to be institutional records; their value in documenting projects is sometimes overlooked.
3. Guidelines for the Appraisal of Records. The purpose of the following appraisal guidelines is to identify the kinds of evidence needed to provide adequate documentation of all major collaborative projects in geophysics and oceanography. The reader should bear in mind that most geophysics research has been and continues to be carried out without multi-institutional cooperation. Because there have been only a few large, multi-institutional collaborations during our period of study (from the early 1970s to the near present), and because these have all been important, we have not felt the need to offer guidelines for identifying the most significant collaborations. We recommend that documentation be preserved for all large, multi-institutional collaborations in geophysics and oceanography.
Our investigations located categories of records that taken as a whole provide this documentation for all multi-institutional collaborative research; the number of record categories varied, but it was never large. For any one project these core records are located at several settings. Some of these organizations lack formal record-keeping procedures; some lack obvious repositories.
The core records for geophysics and oceanography collaborations would include, in the United States: the National Academy of Sciences' discipline studies boards; Federal funding agency project records; records of project planning workshops; records of the project's SMO including records of the SWG; records of the consortium headquarters office, including standing committees records, records of the consortium's director, and records of consortium staff relevant to the design and acquisition of instrumentation. Specifically in oceanographic projects, ships' logs should be retained. Outside the United States, core records would include similar records of national funding agencies and project offices, and records of international science agencies like the International Council of Scientific Unions and the World Meteorological Organization.
Additional documentation should be provided by saving professional papers of distinguished practitioners of these disciplines.
4. Current Institutional Archival Practices. Institutional archival policies are key to the preservation of documentation. For the eight geophysics and oceanographic projects included in the AIP Study, we focused on the archival practices of the funding agencies which are required to retain a minimal amount of documentation concerning these collaborative projects.
While the National Science Foundation does not consider records apart from its headquarters as Federal, the other agencies involved with our case studies in geophysics and oceanography do. These include NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In general these Federal agencies and their laboratories do not document their research and development activities well. While the records schedules of the agencies involved with our case studies vary in the completeness of coverage and quality of their guidelines, all of the agencies we examined need to revise their records schedules in order to capture their research and development activities. Of all the agencies we examined, the USGS's records management program is most severely understaffed. Both the USGS and NOAA have schedules in special need of revision for the areas of research and development. All these agencies' records schedules could be improved with the assistance of the National Archives' appraisal archivists. Improved training of the staff who apply the schedules is also essential.
The function of establishing broad research priorities is carried out in many different arenas. In the United States, the records of the relevant boards of the National Academy of Sciences are preserved in its archives. On an international scale, the International Council of Scientific Unions plays a major role in establishing broad research goals in all areas of science. Its records are preserved in its archives, a practice which other international policy-making bodies should duplicate.
5. Conclusion. Only minimal documentation of collaborations is guaranteed to be preserved, in part because agency records schedules currently provide little, if any, protection for research and development records. The consortia headquarters and SMOs are largely funded by the NSF and therefore their records are considered non-Federal. Special arrangements must be made to secure this valuable documentation for future scholarship.
PART B: PROJECT RECOMMENDATIONS [Back to Top]
The following recommendations are directed specifically to the actions needed to document collaborative research in space science and geophysics. They are justified in more detail in Report No. 2: Documenting Collaborations in Space Science and Geophysics{1}. Most of the documents referred to are currently on paper, but our recommendations also apply to information in electronic format.
Multi-institutional collaborations are virtually all funded by Federal agencies and much of the research and development is carried out at agency facilities. Most of our recommendations are addressed to these agencies, including the National Archives and Records Administration, because successful documentation relies heavily on the effectiveness of their records management programs.
General Recommendation
1. A core set of records should
be saved at appropriate repositories to document multi-institutional collaborations
in space science and geophysics.
There is a short list of records that, taken together, provide adequate documentation
of collaborative projects. These include records of national or international
planning agencies concerning the development of project goals and/or definition;
records of funding agencies documenting the project's proposal process and its
development; records of project science management or consortia headquarters
offices and committees; publicity materials; scientific data with adequate metadata;
and summary financial records.
More specifically, the core records for space science collaborations would include, in the United States: records of the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board; at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Headquarters, the Office of Space Science's strategic planning records and the records of the discipline/program scientist and program manager, along with their respective advisory groups; and at NASA flight centers, the records of the both the project manager and project scientist, along with the Science Working Group; also, records of the instrument manager, where the position exists. Core records for space science in Europe would include: records of the European Space Science Foundation; at the European Space Agency, the records of the Science Policy Council, the Science Program Committee, and the Solar System and Astronomy Working Groups; and at ESTEC (ESA's flight center), records of the project manager and project scientist, along with the Science Working Group; also, the records of the payload specialist. Except for unusual circumstances, records of positions below instrument manager or payload specialist need not be saved.
For geophysics and oceanography, core records would include, in the United States: the National Academy of Sciences' discipline studies boards; Federal funding agency project records; records of project planning workshops; records of the project's Science Management Office including records of the Science Working Group; records of the consortium headquarters office, including standing committees records, records of the consortium's director, and records of consortium staff relevant to the design and acquisition of instrumentation. Specifically in oceanographic projects, ships' logs should be retained. Outside the United States, core records would include similar records of national funding agencies and project offices, and records of international science agencies like the International Council of Scientific Unions and the World Meteorological Organization.
We are aware that, for the largest and most controversial multi-institutional collaborations in space science and geophysics, significant documentation will also be found at higher administrative levels, such as offices of presidents and provosts of universities, top administrators at agencies and laboratories, and other key policy boards. We do not address recommendations to offices at such higher levels on the assumption that their records are already secured.
National Archives and Records
Administration
2. The National Archives and Records Administration should institute a policy
of encouraging Federal agencies to employ professional archivists.
While we propose some ways to improve existing agency records schedules (in our next recommendation, below), the most serious problems we see are the failures to implement records programs by the agencies themselves. Typically, those responsible for records programs are ill-informed about their own institution and its science and technology, and passive about gathering records. Typically, scientists, administrators, and other staff are uninformed about record-keeping programs. We feel certain that the presence of professional archivists would greatly improve these programs and the quality of records offered to the National Archives.
It has traditionally been the policy of the National Archives and Records Administration to discourage the placement of trained archivists at external agencies, preferring to use agency records officers. This is a legacy from the past when the National Archives could take the position that it alone had responsibility for appraising records. The position was more viable when virtually all Federal records were nontechnical; this has not been the case for decades.
The National Archives has seen that professional archivists have been effective at such scientific settings as some of the accelerator laboratories of the Department of Energy; these have offered the National Archives a far better selection of records. The selection is better because a proactive program is in place to review records at the place where they are created, consulting those who created them, for the purpose of providing adequate documentation of the entire facility. These archivists are more knowledgeable than most records managers about the scientific institution and the projects it carries out. Professional archivists should be made part of the records management team--both at agency headquarters and at the key facilities and laboratories. This addition of trained archivists also will help the National Archives understand the unique records creation process at each of the science agencies.
3. The National Archives should make certain that agency records schedules include safeguards for significant research and development records. This may require additional funding--or at least a stable budget--for the National Archive's Records Appraisal and Disposition Division. Of the agencies studied by the AIP, the United States Geological Survey is in most urgent need for such safeguards.
Due to the varied nature of research and development activities in the Federal government, the National Archives rescinded the part of its General Records Schedule, schedule 19, which covered research and development records. It is now up to each Federal agency to work with the National Archives to schedule these records according to the unique practices of their individual agencies. All but one of the agencies involved in space science and geophysics have revised (or are in the process of revising) records schedules.
The schedule that has yet to be revised, that for the United States Geological Survey, has virtually no provision for saving research and development records (apart from seismic data records). The other agency schedules seem to have minimally appropriate coverage. However, they could all improve by adapting the new schedules of the National Institute for Standards and Technology, in which division managers are provided with guidelines for identifying significant research and development projects for which adequate documentation should be offered to the National Archives. The National Archives appraisal archivists play a key role in developing agency records schedules; they should see to it that records of significant research and development are safeguarded.
Federal Science Agencies-General
4. Federal science agencies should employ professional archivists as part of
their records management staff.
Each scientific agency should examine the effectiveness of its existing records management program and seriously consider the benefits of adding professional archivists to its staff. (See Recommendation #2 for some of the arguments.) The many benefits of developing an archival program offset their relatively modest costs. Archivists should be among the staff at headquarters and at major branches, flight centers, etc. that carry out national scientific programs. Such archivists should be expected to work proactively with scientists and administrators to become knowledgeable about their organization and the science and technology it is dedicated to.
5. Federal science agencies' records
management programs should increase educational programs within the agency in
order to stress the importance and benefits of records management.
During our interviews with agency scientists and administrators it became clear
that many individuals creating important science policy records or scientific
research records were unaware of the record-keeping program of their agency.
This was the case in varying degrees at each of the agencies involved in our
selected projects: NASA, NOAA, NSF, and USGS. Educational programs to stress
the importance of following records retention policies in order to document
their projects would increase the survival of significant records. Agency records
management staff should take advantage of workshops offered by the National
Archives. They should, in turn, be expected to offer workshops for their agency
employees, both at headquarters and in the field. One very effective means is
to hold periodic workshops for secretaries and other files administrators (including
those responsible for maintaining central files) so that they understand agency
records schedules and are knowledgeable about which records should be destroyed,
which saved, and how and why.
6. Federal funding agencies should
save a random sampling of unsuccessful proposals in addition to successful ones.
At this time Federal funding agencies are required to save records on successful
proposals (including the proposals, contracts, progress or annual reports, and
final reports). It is important that agencies keep these as record copies, so
that other institutions need not save duplicate materials. In addition, we recommend
that when proposals are submitted for a collaborative research project, a random
sampling of the unsuccessful as well as all of the successful proposals should
be saved. This would give scholars a glimpse into the possible configurations
a project could have taken and would provide context necessary for historical
and policy analysis.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
7. NASA should clarify some confusing
generalities in its new records schedules.
NASA's new records schedules are a great improvement. We note, however, that
some generalities are confusing. The most important we saw was that the terms
"program scientist" and "project scientist" (as well as "program manager" and
"project manager") are treated as interchangeable, but should not be. There
may be other instances.
National Science Foundation
8. The NSF should save records documenting interagency funding of collaborative
research projects.
The NSF is often the sole funder of collaborative research projects in geophysics. In the instances where the NSF shares funding responsibilities with other agencies and takes the lead role, the NSF should preserve its records of interagency meetings, correspondence, agreements, and so forth.
9. The NSF contract laboratories
that lack archival programs should initiate them.
The NSF supports some of the most important laboratories and observatories in
the country. These facilities do not create Federal records and generally lack
strong record-keeping requirements. The NSF should encourage them to initiate
archival programs to secure at least a minimum record.
10. The NSF should include archival
arrangements in the requirements for grants to support science management or
consortium headquarters offices within academic settings.
In each geophysics and oceanographic collaboration, one PI applies for a grant
enabling them to set up an office for administering the project. For the most
part these offices are within a department of a college or university; when
this is the case, the most appropriate repository for the project's core records
would be that institution's archives{2}. The NSF should
stipulate that these arrangements be made as part of the requirements under
the grant. An addition of a fraction of 1% to the amount awarded to the investigators
would pay for the eventual closing of the office and the orderly transfer of
records.
Academic Institutions
11. Academic archives should enlarge
as necessary the scope of collecting policies in order to accession selected
records of science management offices and consortium headquarters offices within
their institutions.
These offices last the lifetimes of the projects, which may be quite short.
The academic institution within which they operate should hold themselves responsible
for accessioning core records of the project. If such arrangements are not possible,
the records should be offered as a gift to the Archivist of the United States
and the National Archives and Records Administration.
12. Professional files of PIs and
other scientists should be retained by their home institutions according to
their individual careers.
The professional papers of PIs are a prime location for information concerning
the development of an experiment or an experiment team. For those who have regularly
led or participated in important research, their papers are worth saving. Academic
archivists should continue their practice of saving papers of scientists according
to the significance of their overall careers.
Freestanding Geophysical Institutions
13. Freestanding but temporary American
geophysical institutions should offer historically valuable records as a gift
to the Archivist of the United States and the National Archives and Records
Administration at the end of a project.
In a few cases, rather than setting up consortium headquarters offices in academic
settings, entirely new and freestanding but temporary institutions are created
to manage a collaborative geophysics project. The records are in danger of being
destroyed after the project ends. Due to their importance and the evidence they
provide of Federally funded science, selected records of these consortia should
be offered as a gift to the Archivist of the United States and the National
Archives in order to ensure their preservation.
Need for Prompt Action
Since all the projects we studied are from the recent past, our findings do
not necessarily apply to patterns of records destruction that may take place
sometime after projects are completed. Like other groups, most physicists only
keep documents if they think they will be useful to them. Good records-keeping
may be acknowledged by all as necessary while the experimental process is alive,
but when the project is over, records can easily be neglected, forgotten, or
destroyed. A decade from now, many, if not most, of the records identified by
the AIP project may well be gone. To be most effective in documenting multi-institutional
collaborations, future archival efforts should take place during the brief period
of years when the records-keeping needs of the scientific collaborations coincide
with the goals of archivists and responsibilities to posterity.
5. See Section II.B.4.a., above.
6. See Section II.B.2., above.
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