Summary: International Workshop on Historic Scientific Instrument Collections in Universities This proposal seeks partial support for an international workshop to bring together working scientists in universities and colleges with historians of science, museum curators, and archivists. The workshop is a follow-on to the international conference on Scientific Instrument Collections in Universities (SICU) held at Dartmouth College in June 2004. SICU was an ambitious first attempt by this nascent community to find hidden instrument collections and to assemble a wide spectrum of people with common interests in formalizing university collections. As a first step, SICU was successful in bringing to light some important collections and in organizing an interested group of more than 80 international scholars. However, much remains to be done to effectively promote interactions between these scholars and scientists and curators involved with university collections. The aim of the proposed workshop is to take the next steps in the process of getting scientists and historians of science to communicate and collaborate on conducting research and education based on historical scientific instruments. Specifically, three main needs for an intensive gathering of interested practitioners have been identified: access, security, and utilization of collections. The scientific community needs to be more involved in the effort, as they have the background and understanding of the science concepts that many of these collections were created to teach. There are many more collections of varying dates that have not yet become accessible to the scholarly community, and often, only university scientists know about these collections. Security of collections involves developing an understanding of their value and a practical resource base for their proper care. Effective utilization of these instruments for scholarship, science education, and public outreach requires a broad effort of awareness and an accessible reference guide to their intended purposes. Meeting these three needs is the overarching goal of this workshop. The intellectual merit of this project comes through the extension of the resource base for scholars focusing on the material culture of science beyond the major museum collections that have been used and documented for many years. The workshop will divulge the wealth of historically significant scientific equipment that may still exist in most major colleges and universities founded prior to the 1950's. In addition, a network of researchers will be developed that would jointly work to establish a context and background for any unknown instruments found in newly accessed collections and contributed by historians, curators, and scientists. Solutions and descriptions to these mysteries would be published in the open literature. The broader impact of this project derives from the fact that participants will work cooperatively to develop a community-wide compendium of scientific instrument collections online that would meet the needs of scientists, historians of science, museum curators, and science educators. As conceived, the compendium would include significant aspects of the instrument: science, history, inventor, instrument maker, references, videos, and demonstration contexts. It will also serve as a practical resource guide for stewards of these collections. Such a compendium will require interdisciplinary involvement and collaboration between the science, history, education, and curatorial communities; the workshop format will be used to establish guidelines for the development of this resource. This compendium will have far reaching impacts for the history of science, science education, and public outreach through the increased knowledge of, access to, and utilization of these significant university resources. The workshop will be held at the University of Mississippi, home to the Millington-Barnard Collection of 19th Century Natural Philosophy Demonstration Apparatus. This 500-piece collection was acquired by the University in 1852-1860 and narrowly escaped destruction during the Civil War. Pieces from the top instrument makers in the U.S., France, Germany, and England were used for instruction in Physics and Astronomy for more than 150 years and are now exhibited in the University Museum. . Approximately 100 participants are anticipated at the workshop from outside the University of Mississippi.
