Standing down the International Catalog of Sources

The AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives is transitioning away from its International Catalog of Sources, an online catalog which strove to describe all primary sources on the history of physics at institutions across the world, towards a catalog focused solely on our own library and archival holdings. This is in response to the growth of internet search technology, the rise of alternative library cataloging consortia, and the rapidly expanding universe of primary source material.

The International Catalog of Sources (ICOS) began as a series of print publications, which described holdings at other institutions as well as our own. When we moved onto the internet in the late 1990s, we adapted that same thinking to our online catalog. At the time, many institutions lacked usable online catalogs, and the means for even finding websites were similarly inadequate.

As an outgrowth of ICOS, we also created the Physics History Finding Aids Web Site (PHFAWS; we can’t resist an unwieldy acronym). With PHFAWS, we offered to host finding aids for other institutions on our website to increase discoverability. This quickly grew into a project to not only catalog online finding aids hosted at institutions all over the world, but to make them all discoverable through a single bespoke search engine. The proliferation of finding aids, and the different technologies behind them, eventually made the search feature effectively impossible to maintain; and the results had always been inconsistent.

Users now have many other ways to find archival records. The first and most obvious choice for many users is modern web search engines. A more exacting tool is the search hub of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine , a group which includes AIP as a member institution. OCLC offers WorldCat , “the world’s largest library catalog,” which lets users search a catalog compiled from libraries worldwide, and directs users to books and archives at nearby libraries. WorldCat has a sister project at OCLC, ArchiveGrid , which focuses on searching archival holdings all over the world. AIP contributes to each of these tools.

As new technologies have emerged and grown, the limitations of ICOS have become evident. Maintaining the catalog required biannual surveys of outside institutions; in the early days these could be done in a few hours, but with the growth of the internet these surveys expanded into projects that each consumed a month or more of staff time. Additionally, as a US institution seeking to embrace the whole world’s output, we were never able to fully document collections outside the Anglosphere.

ICOS was a natural extension of our other strategies for supporting outside institutions in the description of physics history material, which will continue. We track records of physicists and organizations which merit being preserved, guide these records towards deposit at other institutions, and follow up to ensure that these records are processed. We remain committed to preserving and making known the history of physics, regardless of who holds custody of the material.

You will see the change in our catalog in the coming months. Users will still be able to search all of our holdings, and will have the option of focusing only on books and published materials, or on archives, or faceting searches along many other criteria. Removing the records from other institutions will make it much easier for researchers to find NBL&A materials. The data collected for ICOS will be preserved, and may be used in future projects. We will also continue to host archival finding aids for institutions which do not have web hosting for their own. Ulitmately, our hope is a more coherent search experience for our users, while we continue to support the work of other institutions in other ways.

If you have questions or comments about changes to our catalog, or would like assistance with your research, please reach out to us at nbl@aip.org .