Materials Research Activities

Ashley Rindsberg: Cornell Center for Materials Research Archive Project

Cornell Center for Materials Research Archive Project

Project Summary and Explanation

Ashley Rindsberg

April, 2002

In early March of 2002, Cornell Center for Materials Research, an interdisciplinary center devoted to materials research and funded by the NSF, began to coordinate a project with Arne Hessenbruch, an historian of science at the Dibner Institute at MIT. The impetus for the project came from Arne and the History of Recent Science and Technology program at MIT, where historical research on bioinformatics, the Apollo Guidance Computer, the physics of scales, molecular evolution, and, of course, materials science is conducted using the web as a means of providing information on the development of these disciplines to a (geographically and intellectually) wide range of scientists and scholars.

As one of the original universities funded, at the time, by ARPA for the development of a research and instruction-based, integrative center devoted to materials science, Cornell was able to develop a center for materials research that is rooted in the birth of the field. The development of the Center (then called Materials Science Center) was not simply a move forward for physical research at Cornell; its formation, along with the formation of the other materials science centers in the country, constituted the synthesis of the field. As such, the correspondences, minutes, budgets, and reports housed in CCMR's file-cabinet-archive provide scientists, historians and scholars of science, with a firsthand account of the development of materials research as an independent and autonomous discipline.

On the CCMR side of things, Helene Schember, Associate Director of the Center, Ivan Johnson, the Center's computer manger, and I, a Science and Technology Studies and Philosophy undergraduate, have been working to transfer the physical archive onto a digital one. This has meant sorting through the heaps of documents (many of them carbon-copies), devising a hierarchical structure that can sort documents into kinds, and developing file-naming conventions that allow the saved documents to be easily ordered and accessed. Each step of the process is an organic one: the hierarchy I have devised has changed, and will continue to change, with the discovery of new documents and the surfacing of new and different considerations; the file-naming code, developed by Ivan, has evolved too, alternately including and excluding different sorts of tags for meta-data and conventions used to reference various levels of detailed information about each document.

The final objective of the project is to furnish an accessible archive that very accurately reflects the physical archive located at the Center in order to provide the History of Recent Science and Technology program at MIT a glimpse into the workings of CCMR. This entails the construction of the hierarchical directory structure mentioned above, a system of file-naming that is capable of ordering documents and providing tags for meta-data, and, finally, actually scanning the documents into an electronic format.

This page was last updated on 28 April 2002 by Arne Hessenbruch.