Carnegie Institution of Washington

Carnegie Institution

News

September 24, 2003

Contact John Strom at 202-939-1101, e-mail jstrom@ciw.edu; Shaun Hardy at 202-478-7960, e-mail hardy@dtm.ciw.edu; or Tina McDowell at 202-939-1120, e-mail tmcdowell@ciw.edu

Major grant backs Carnegie preservation efforts

Washington, D.C. Efforts to preserve the records of 100 years of scientific discovery at the Carnegie Institution have received a major boost in the form of a $240,741 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The institution, one of the nation’s first privately funded basic research organizations, houses an irreplaceable archive documenting the progress of American science in the 20th Century. The NHPRC is a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration and supports a wide range of activities to preserve and encourage the use of historic documents relating to the history of the United States.

Funding for the two-year initiative, dubbed “Carnegie Legacy,” will set the institution’s archives on a firm footing. Professional archivists will comb through 1,700 feet of records and more than 37,000 historic photographs at Carnegie’s administrative headquarters and its Earth and space science research campus in northwest Washington, D.C. Valuable materials that have languished in dusty, poorly accessible locations will be transferred to state-of-the-art storage facilities. Records will be organized and finding aids posted on a project Web site for researchers to access worldwide. Online exhibits will introduce viewers to the institution’s archival treasures.

Representative of the archives’ holdings are documents that chronicle the institution’s pioneering work in atomic physics in the 1930s; experimental studies of rocks and minerals that probed the deep interior of the Earth; and expeditions from the high Arctic to the tropics. Noted scientists whose correspondence are in the collection include astronomer George Ellery Hale, geneticist Barbara McClintock, and Vannevar Bush, science advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the architect of U.S. defense research during World War II.

The genesis of the Legacy Project emerged during preparation for the institution’s centennial exhibition in 2002. As curators selected primary source material for display, the need for a formal archives program became apparent. Shaun Hardy, librarian at Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and Geophysical Laboratory, remarked: “Our holdings include some extraordinary pieces of science in the making. We’ve been wanting to make this material more accessible for a long time and now NHPRC has given us this great opportunity.”

John Strom, Carnegie’s Web Manager, directs the Carnegie Legacy Project. Key personnel include project archivists Charles Hargrove and Jennifer Snyder, and Rachel Ban of History Associates, Inc.—a Maryland-based professional archival, historical, and records management firm that is providing project oversight and evaluation.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington (www.CarnegieInstitution.org) has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research since 1902. It is a private, nonprofit organization with six research departments in the U.S.: Plant Biology and Global Ecology in Stanford, CA.; The Observatories in Pasadena, CA, and Chile; Embryology, in Baltimore, MD.; and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC.