Facilities
The Archive
Six decades of field data, preserved in full. A recording made before it could be understood may be understood later. The archive is the instrument.
The Laboratories keep everything. Every hour of every recording, every calibration, every instrument drawing, is preserved. The discipline sounds simple and is not: it means resisting, for sixty years, the temptation to discard what seems at the time to be noise.
Why the record is kept in full
A signal that means nothing today may match one recorded forty years ago. A recording made before the analysis existed to understand it may be understood when the analysis catches up. The recovered 1966 tape -- a persistent carrier too faint to hear at the time, recovered decades later by distributed reanalysis -- exists only because the tape was never thrown away.
The archive holds magnetic tape, paper chart records, digitized field data, instrument drawings, and the correspondence of the Laboratories back to 1958. Its oldest recordings are consulted more often than one might expect.
Access
The published record is available online under Publications and the Reading Room. Archive materials are held at Calder Ridge and are available to researchers by arrangement. The Laboratories ask for advance notice; not all holdings can be retrieved quickly, and some cannot be retrieved at all.
- 1.FAL Technical Report 23-002, Preservation standards for the institute archive.