It Takes a Village: Documenting the Contributions of Non-Scientific Staff to Scientific Research

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of documenting non-scientific staff contributions in large-scale scientific research, highlighting oral histories and records as vital for understanding the full scope of collaborative scientific endeavors.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive approach to capturing the roles of support staff and social histories in documenting scientific research at Fermilab.

Findings

Oral histories effectively document support staff contributions.

Records of social and administrative activities are essential for comprehensive research history.

Support staff contributions are crucial for understanding scientific collaborations.

Abstract

Science, especially large-scale basic research, is a collaborative endeavor, often drawing on the skills of people from a wide variety of disciplines. These people include not just scientists, but also administrators, engineers, and many others. Fermilab, a Department of Energy National Laboratory and the United States' premier particle physics laboratory, exemplifies this kind of research; many of its high-energy physics experiments involve hundreds of collaborators from all over the world. The Fermilab Archives seeks to document the history of the lab and the unique scientific research its staff and visitors perform. Adequately documenting the lab's work often requires us to go far beyond things like the writings and correspondence of scientists to also capture the administrative and social histories of the experiments and the context in which they were performed. At Fermilab, we have sought to capture these elements of the lab's activities through an oral history program that focuses on support staff as well as physicists and collection development choices that recognize the importance of records documenting the cultural life of the lab. These materials are not merely supplementary, but rather essential documentation of the many types of labor that go into the planning and execution of an experiment or the construction of an accelerator and the context in which this work is performed.