[NOTE: This resource was created while Martin Harwitt was the Director of the National Air and Space Museum. See NASM Departments for current NASM Director and organizational information.]
A fundamental aid in advancing scholarship in any historical field is a well-crafted guide identifying and describing primary source materials. Such guides serve the essential function of connecting research interests of scholars with available documentation. They also serve as an important analytic complement to current scholarship by pointing to new opportunities for research as well as suggesting areas where efforts need to be intensified to document key subjects properly.
This updated, corrected and enlarged Guide is one such basic research tool. The history of air and space flight is central to the research of a growing community of scholars, working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. This Guide facilitates this burgeoning research interest, and reflects the Museum's interest in encouraging the preservation of primary archival sources of air and space history.
We began developing this listing in 1977. In 1989 we published a preliminary edition titled "A Directory of Sources for Air and Space History". It contained descriptions of 1684 collections in 350 repositories in the United States. The present electronic text, more appropriately called a Guide than a Directory, describes approximately 2250 collections in over 370 repositories. It is available for public and staff use on the museum's computer network. It is being updated at intervals with collection descriptions taken from the museum's accession records, which number some 1460 collections at present.
This Guide includes many of the most significant collections in the United States, but it is not a complete compendium of archival materials documenting air and space history. Many other collections of aviation and aerospace archival materials are recorded in electronic databases and in manual finding aids worldwide. In addition to querying Internet, researchers will need to search computer services such as America OnLine, CompuServe, OCLC, Prodigy, RLIN, and others. However, this Guide will be a useful tool for the archival and research communities because it is the only broad-based research guide in its field.
The Museum again thanks all archivists and subject experts who submitted the information we have included. We will continue updating the Guide, and we encourage all users to submit corrections and suggestions about additional collections and repositories. Please fax or mail corrected or new information by filling out the survey form at the end of the text, particularly noting the database(s) in which the information is stored.
Martin Harwit, Director
National Air and Space Museum
November 1994
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