Formalizing Informal Communication: An Archaeology of the Early Pre-Web Preprint Infrastructure at CERN

TL;DR

This paper explores the origins and formalization of preprint communication at CERN in the 1960s, revealing how informal practices evolved into a structured information system for scientific dissemination.

Contribution

It provides a systematic historical analysis of the early preprint infrastructure at CERN, highlighting practices, organizational context, and formalization processes.

Findings

Preprints were used for informal sharing of instructions and tools.

CERN's library played a key role in formalizing preprint communication.

Preprint infrastructure became a public awareness tool for the community.

Abstract

This article deals with the early development of preprint communication in high-energy physics, specifically with how preprint communication was formalized in the early 1960s at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It employs a sociological conception of infrastructures to ask which practices and technologies of communication structured the use of preprints in the field at the time and subsequently solidified into the research community's communication and information system. The text conducts an archaeology of the early preprint infrastructure along the lines of three systematic-historical explorations. 1. the use of preprints as media to privately and informally share practical instructions and theoretical tools in the fast-moving current of postwar theoretical physics, 2. the institutional and organizational context of library and documentation work at CERN around mid-century, which acted as a backdrop for creating the preprint infrastructure, and 3. the actual formalization of preprint communication into an information system at the CERN library in the early 1960s, which treated preprints as public "current awareness tools" for the benefit of the whole community, informing members of recent progress in the field. The article concludes with a discussion of what we can learn from the pre-Web history of the preprint communication in the field about current understandings of scientific communication.