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Within each article information is presented as follows. First comes the heading (i.e., the name of a physicist, say "X") followed immediately by an asterisk if there is a schematic biography of X in the project's files. Next come the individual's date and place of birth and, if he is deceased, of death. Then follows a brief chronology of the relevant part (i.e., usually through 1939) of X's career taken from the project's biography or from standard biographical dictionaries. If physicist X has been interviewed, the transcript has been examined for additions or corrections to these chronologies; otherwise they share the not always impeccable reliability of their sources. After this preliminary biographical material, the inventory of primary sources begins.
The first section of the inventory for physicist X is Interviews. In it are listed the number of sessions and the number of pages of transcript for all interviews with X. Similar information is given here for interviews with relatives or acquaintances in which X was the main topic of conversation. Fuller data on the interviews are provided in Chapter III.
The second section is Letters to. Here are noted all letters in the project's archive from X to any other physicist whose name heads an article in this chapter. Recipients are listed in alphabetical order, and the letters they received are indicated in chronological order after each name. In this section and elsewhere an isolated date in whatever form, or even the term "[undated]," indicates a single letter unless there is an explicit statement to the contrary. This notation, individual listing by single date, is usually used for letters written in or before 1935; after that time a condensed notation (total number of letters and the interval over which they were written) is often used instead.
The "Letters to" section also introduces two other special notations that recur elsewhere in the entry. First is the use of parentheses to locate the item listed. For example, if the initial parenthesis in a list of letters to a given recipient is (49,2), then all letters to the left of that parenthesis are on Microfilm No. 49, Section 2. If the next parenthesis is (BSC 1,4), then the letters between the previous parenthesis and this one are to be found on Microfilm No. 1, Section 4, of the separately numbered films of the Bohr Scientific Correspondence. The same notation is used to give the location of other materials on the project's microfilm and, by an extension, to supply the catalog or file number, when known, of material held in other collections.
Occasionally an item or part of an item in a list of letters or elsewhere in the inventory is placed in italics, indicating that an anomaly has been introduced for convenience into the listing. For example, letters addressed by one physicist to the wife of another are here listed as though addressed to the physicist himself, but the entry is italicized. Again, letters written by one physicist to an administrator about a second physicist may here be listed as letters to the second physicist, again with italics. Those interested in any italicized entry will find full particulars both on the film and in the card catalog from which these entries are condensed.
The third section of each alphabetical entry is Letters from. It is a list of physicists from whom physicist X received letters. The list is restricted to physicists whose names head articles elsewhere in the chapter. Full particulars about any letter received can therefore be found in the "Letters to" section of the article accorded its author.
The next section is Manuscripts. Here are listed all notebooks, lectures, drafts of paper, and so on, written by X. Also included are occasional biographical or historical memoirs written by someone else but concerned primarily with physicist X. All items are listed chronologically in so far as possible. The number of pages and the date of composition, when known, are also given.
Sometimes one of these manuscripts will relate to more than one physicist on the heading list, and they are then cross-referenced. The phrase "See Y," in this or any other section of an article is a cross-reference designed to lead the reader to the corresponding section of the article for physicist Y.
The fifth section of each entry, usually also the last, is Unpublished material held elsewhere. Information gained by the project about relevant records in other collections is listed here, under the name of the collection or institution involved. The listing is arranged alphabetically by country; and within each country, alphabetically by city or, in the case of the United States, alphabetically by state. (For the sources of this information and for the addresses to which inquiries should be sent, see Chapter 1, Section 5, and also Appendix 3.) The special notations used in this section are generally the same as those described above, but the criteria for inclusion of information are slightly different. In particular, because the information would otherwise be unavailable in this report, all letters written by physicist X are listed here whether or not they are written to a person accorded a separate article in this chapter. In the cases of the Bohr, Pauli, and Weyl collections, however, letters written to people not accorded articles are included only if the correspondence begins in or before 1939. Any other choice would have made some entries unmanageable without adding much relevant information.
A few entries close with a section of Other information. Usually this is a report, presumed to be reliable, about the destruction of materials for which one might otherwise have sought at length. In a few cases, this section is used to call attention to the existence of manuscript holdings that the staff has not, for one reason or another, been able to examine or copy. Some additional information about unexamined papers will be found here and there in Chapter IV.
Because our goal was a manageable survey of known primary sources, the techniques and criteria outlined above have occasionally excluded significant documents from the inventory in this chapter. Readers should know what the omissions are and how they can be remedied. First, records of institutions (e.g., the Minute Books of the (2V Club) are not listed here, because they are attributable to no individual. All such records, however, if filmed by the project, are collected on Microfilms No. 20, 35, and 38, and can easily be discovered from the table of contents of those films given in Chapter IV. Again, because letters which occur on microfilms held by the project are listed in this chapter only when both author and recipient have been accorded articles, much administrative correspondence and some correspondence between physicists are omitted from the entries which follow. This is, however, listed on the table of contents of the project's microfilm given in Chapter IV and can be found either by inspecting that chapter or by use of the index. For example, the exchange of letters between Sommerfeld and the Dean of the Faculty at Tübingen University can be located by looking up Tübingen in the index, an entry which will refer back to the description of Microfilm No. 34, Section 6, in Chapter IV. Again, the project's microfilm includes three letters from G. C. Wick: one each to Heisenberg, Kramers, and Sommerfeld, the earliest written around 1933. So small an amount of relatively late materials did not justify an alphabetical heading for Wick in this chapter. His letters can, however, be discovered by inspection of Chapter IV or, more directly, by reference to the index under his name.