A documentation research project to study the complex issues facing the historical documentation of multi-institutional collaborations in physics and allied sciences. "Probes" are in-depth studies of three highly significant collaborations: the discoveries of the psi at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the upsilon experiments at Fermilab, and the CLEO experiment and the origins of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring at Cornell University. The psi discovery (SLAC-SP-017) was a collaboration between physicists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The discovery of a new family of particles starting with the psi began the era of spectroscopy of quark systems. The particle was discovered simultaneously by a Brookhaven National Laboratory/Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaboration at Brookhaven. The detector used for SLAC-SP-017, the Mark I, was a prototype for many future colliding beam detectors. The experiment was approved in 1973 and completed running in 1976.