ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Preprints, Libraries, and the Women Who Built the Physics Communication Infrastructure in the 20th Century

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives: Diversity, Geographies, and Possibilities in the Physical Sciences (no 1)

English Abstract

Preprints are an essential communication medium in physics, and servers like arXiv.org act as important infrastructures to share the newest information openly and widely. However, the story of the woman librarians who created the first pre-internet preprint infrastructure is little known. Drawing on my ongoing research into the media history of preprint communication, my paper portrays the work of Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont at CERN and Louise Addis at SLAC, who were principally involved in designing, developing, and maintaining the physics preprint infrastructure between the 1950s and 1970s. Initially, preprints were informal communications shared between physicists via private networks. As they gained in popularity by mid-century, and became an important information resource for doing research, Goldschmidt-Clermont began requesting that physicists around the globe send their preprints to the library at CERN for public display and cataloguing, making the newest accessions available to the local research community. In 1962, she travelled to Stanford to consult with Addis, who subsequently implemented the CERN method of preprint acquisition at the SLAC library. In the late 1960s, Addis became involved in the establishment of a campuswide online literature database for the physics community, the precursor to today’s INSPIRE web database. She also developed a bi-weekly newsletter to announce the newest preprints to subscribers at institutes around the globe. Highlighting the information technologies these women implemented to connect a global community to the newest knowledge in the field, my paper demonstrates how libraries fundamentally shaped communication at the time, thus providing a critical “prehistory” of today’s digital infrastructure in physics.

Author

• Phillip Roth, RWTH Aachen University