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NBLA Catalog Navigation Guide: Additional Resources

A guide to navigating the AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives online catalog

Overview

The Niels Bohr Library & Archives catalog is a useful resource for searching the physical collections at NBLA and in the International Catalog of Sources, but we also have additional resources to aid research beyond the catalog! Many of these are linked on our website and on the catalog homepage, but here is an overview of these additional resources.

What is NOT in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives Online Catalog:

  • Finding Aids -- Our catalog records provide a brief overview of a collection, subject terms, and a URL link to a finding aid, but does not include the full text of the finding aid itself (e.g. folder and box descriptions). Thus if you are doing archival research, it may be helpful to search in our Archival Finding Aid Database as well to find collections that may contain references to your topic beyond the top-level catalog record. Note that the finding aids here are not only for collections held by the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, but also some of the collections held by institutions world wide as part of ICOS for which we provide the finding aid for a collection physically located elsewhere.
    • Member Society Portals -- Curated cross-collection lists of materials related to AIP Member Societies, which highlight thousands of photographs, oral history interviews, and items from digital collections, along with descriptions of the Member Societies’ archival records held in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, as well as historical collections of interest held in libraries and archives around the world.
  • Digital Collections --- We have several digitized collections, including the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, which is not indexed in our catalog. For digitized books or individual items, there may be a link in the catalog record to our digital repository, but to search the OCR and information (especially for photographs) you will need to search our online Digital Collections Repository.
    • Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA): Collection of more than 30,000 historical digital images, photographs, slides, lithographs, engravings, drawings and other visual materials. The collection is richest in portraits and snapshots of modern American physicists, astronomers and geophysicists but includes many other scientists as well as photos and illustrations of laboratories, telescopes, accelerators and other instruments, objects and places. The collection is named in honor of Emilio Segrè, best known for his Nobel Prize-winning work in nuclear and high-energy physics, but also an avid photographer and author of books on the history of modern physics. 
      Note: Individual photographs are NOT indexed in our online catalog. To search the ESVA, you need to search our digital repository directly. 
  • Oral History Transcripts -- Our catalog has records for all oral histories held at AIP, digitized or not, and is usually a good place to start if you are looking for oral histories of or about specific people. The catalog record will provide a URL link to the OHI transcript if there is one available online. However if you wish to do a full text search of the oral history transcripts themselves (e.g. to find words or mentions across the whole collection), you should consult our Oral History Transcript Database containing searchable OCRed PDFs of transcripts. 

Research Guides

Research Guides from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives. These guides highlight resources across NBLA's physical and digital collections to aid with research and finding materials in particular subject areas.

Digital Collections Repository and ESVA


Note on the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA):

To search for specific photographs within the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, search the general search bar of the digital repository and then limit the search results by "Image". You can also browse images by collection. 

Copyright Disclaimer

Please note that the American Institute of Physics does not claim copyright to many of the items in our Digital Collections, especially photographs. 

The American Institute of Physics digitizes and publishes online selected materials from its collections so that they can be discovered and used. In order to facilitate the re-use of our digital collections in personal, scholarly, and commercial projects, the library is making an effort to assign simple and clear rights statements to most items in its digital collections. These statements describe the copyright status, under current U.S. law, as far as it is known by the Niels Bohr Library & Archives.

While the library can provide guidance on copyright for materials in its collections, it is ultimately the responsibility of the user to make the final determination about the legality of re-using materials from the digital and photograph collections. If you have questions about our publication and reuse policies in general or about the copyright status of a specific item, please contact the Niels Bohr Library & Archives at nbl@aip.org

Oral History Transcripts

If you are looking to see if we have any oral history by a particular person, we recommend searching the catalog first, as it will show all oral histories that we have in our collections regardless of whether the transcript is available online.

To search the full text of online transcripts, use our Oral History Interview Portal.

To request a digital copy of the audio for an oral history, please use our Item Request Form. Contact us at nbl@aip.org for permission to quote from an oral history in a publication (or submit a Permission Request Form)