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Re: Grant Administration Files 

This message bounced when it was first sent; I am forwarding it to 
STHC-L for Deborah Day, and will look into the reason it didn't go 
through before.

Russell Johnson
STHC-L administrator



--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 11:48:35 -0800
From: "Deborah Day" >Deborah@library.ucsd.edu<
To: <sthc-l@library.ucla.edu>
Subject: Grant Administration Files

I am responding to Baker's inquiry about grant administration files.

I am one of the few archivists I know who accepts grant administration 
files in this archives.  I receive the files of the Scripps Institution 
of Oceanography Contract and Grant Records, which includes the initial 
proposal and preliminary correspondence with potential funders for 
funded and never-funded grants, grant reports, and budget material.  
These files also contain contracts for research.  In oceanography, 
these contracts are often with scientific organizations or industry 
(i.e. Geological Society of America, Oil Exploration and Petroleum 
companies).

I was trained at MIT under Helen Samuels.  At that time, MIT did not 
accept grant and contract files (which were at MITwere enormous).  
Helen argued that the most important grants and contracts would be 
documented in the papers of scientists who served as PI's, and that 
funders (i.e. NSF) keep records on funded proposals.  She also said 
that C&G files were so big, they would swamp the archives and never get 
processed.  There is a lot of truth in her point of view, especially at 
MIT.

On the other hand, this institution, the Scripps Institution of 
Oceanography, is the oldest oceanographic institutution in the US and 
one of only a handful of institutions that work in the field of 
oceanography.  I am persuaded that the SIO C&G records are an important 
record documenting the discipline of oceanography, since a significant 
amount of the federal r&d funds in this discipline are expended at this 
institution.  

SIO has two missions, research and teaching, and of these two research 
is the most important.  Therefore, I have an obligation to document 
research at SIO, and C&G records are a good way to do that. 

I have found that while some funders do keep funded proposal material, 
others discard it after a period of years, and researchers have 
complained to me that they find it very difficult to locate and access 
some grant records  (i.e. Navy records documenting support for 
oceanography) in Washington.  

SIO was one of the first institutions to receive ONR funds, and ONR was 
a pioneer of federal support for science. The relationship of science 
and the military continues to be a strong theme in the history of 
science, especially among scholars studying  oceanography.  C&G records 
are important documentation of the relationship of oceanography and the 
navy.

Finally, the never-funded grants capture a type of information 
otherwise unavailable to researchers: they document what projects 
oceanographers wished to work on but which did not receive funding.  
The best example I can think of is the many unfunded proposals during 
NSF's IDOE (International Decade of Ocean Exploration) program during 
the 1970's when international collaborative grants were favored over 
local initiatives.

I would not advocate that every college and university archives solicit 
C&G records.  But archives of research institutions working in narrow 
fields funded by a diverse funding community (not just NSF) may find 
that these records are useful to their researchers, especially if they 
do not have strong holdings of the scientific papers of PI's.   

And Helen was right, these files are voluminous and can swamp the 
archives; so archivists need to do functional analysis, consider 
targeted selection techniques and think about this matter very 
carefully. 



Deborah Day
Archivist
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0219 USA
tel: (858) 534-4878
fax: 858 534 5269
web: http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/archives

--- End Forwarded Message ---
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