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re: fwd: QUERY: science/technology archives 

On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, RUSSELL A JOHNSON wrote:

>      One goes that 
>      funded contract and grant records are saved by funding agencies (NSF, 
>      NIH, ONR), thus it would be redundant for research institutions to 
>      save these very voluminous files.  I've also heard that the most 
>      important contracts and proposals are naturally found in the personal 
>      papers of prominent pi's, so, again, it would be redundant to save the 
>      files of the campus contracts and grants office.  However, I have 
>      heard back from historians that it is sometimes difficult to locate 
>      specific proposals (especially unfunded ones) through granting 
>      agencies or in the National Archives.

I think that relying on proposals to be kept in the personal papers of 
pi's is not a very reliable way of ensuring the retention of the
documnetation, since the papers of most will not end up in an archives,
and those that do may have been weeded numerous times before they get
there.  We keep the proposals, final reports, and some other closing
documents for all *funded* projects (whether they are funded by granting
agencies or by contracts with private companies), and also the
centralized records of patent submissions resulting from these projects.
The rationale for this is that we should keep at least skeletal
documentation for the research done here.  It is true that information about 
specific projects may be  obtainable from another source, but I think it
would be very difficult to construct an overall picture of the research
done here without these records. 

Richard Hollinger
Archivist, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
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