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| Thank you to Mark Wilson, former editor of Physical Review B, for providing this "mock up" of Volume I, Issue 3 of The Physical Review. Clicking on the images on this webpage will take you to larger versions. |
In the beginning, Physical Review was printed by McMillan. The printing plates later came to Cornell and were used to print replacement issues on demand. With the advent of photocopying, the plates were no longer needed and were destroyed. Only two of the original printing plates still exist. Dr. Dale Corson graciously loaned his printing plate of the front cover of Volume 1, issue 1 for this display.
In 1912, the American Physical Society assumed publication of the Physical Review. Volume 1, issue I of Series II in January 1913 marked the change in ownership. In 1959, Physical Review Letters became a separate publication. Series III began in 1970 when Physical Review split into A, B ,C, and D. Physical Review E began in 1990. In 1994, the journals together contained 8704 articles and totaled 69,412 pages.
APS News Online August/September 2002 Issue
http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0801/080101.html
Keeping the Promise: Phys Rev Completes Online Archive
PROLA functions primarily as an infinitely more useful replacement for some 200 feet and 1,600,000 pages of archival APS journals, the early volumes of which are deteriorating. Librarians have welcomed PROLA, noting that Physical Review is one of the few physics journals of whose older copies are still in active use.
The PROLA project took shape in the early and mid-1990s, when the Naval Research Lab was engaged in a cooperative research and development agreement with APS to scan images of Physical Review for an electronic library initiative, and a Los Alamos National Lab group was converting Physical Review legacy typesetting data into a searchable archive. Then the World Wide Web appeared on the scene and the result was a cooperative APS-NRL-LANL agreement in which the NRL images were delivered to the Los Alamos PROLA group and integrated into a search engine for delivery via the Web. PROLA moved to the APS Editorial Office in 1998, under the direction of Mark Doyle, a young physicist who came to APS in 1996 from LANL, where he had worked with Paul Ginsparg on the pre-print archive. Doyle added many new features and considerable sophistication to PROLA, which he launched online at the end of 1998, with Physical Review from 1985 to 1996.
On June 7, 2001, the first PROLA mirror site, hosted by the Cornell University Library, became available. Mark Doyle of the American Physical Society sent the following facts and figures about the Cornell PROLA mirror site:
- The PROLA site contains 275,000 articles, 1.6 million scanned pages for about 250,000 of the articles and about 25,000 articles as PDF files. (This is for 1893-1998). There are roughly another 50,000 articles for 1999-present
- Total storage for the mirror is about 330 GB.
- The main site gets hits from about 3000 individual IP addresses per day and the Cornell mirror gets about 1700 per day. This is the minimal number of users. The total number of hits is much larger.
We are happy to have Physical Review back at Cornell in its present electronic form (PROLA). We also have a full run of The Physical Review in paper. Series I (1893-1912) Series II (1913-1969) are also available on microfilm. Most researchers enjoy the convenience of twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week access to PROLA. Many feel that the printed image of older articles is superior to the results obtained by coming to the library and photocopying the article.
Correspondence
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| Thank you to the Rare and Manuscripts Collections for proving these photoopies of correspondence and the photograph of Prof. Nichols. | ||
Journals
Faculty at Cornell University started several scientific journals in the late 19th Century. Here are some examples.
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Evidence of the information explosion, the yearly bound volmes of the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters from 1898, 1908, 1918.... to 1978. The earliest volumes (on the left) form an amiable several-inch stack, while the most recent ones (on the right) form a tower of paper that threatens to topple on Val Fitch, standing behind it, in the Princeton physics and mathematics library. The 1988 stack was left out of the photograph because it would have been much too high. (Source: Physics Today 42(12): 53, 1989. Credit: Robert P. Matthews.)
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Marty Blume, Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society with the server for the Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA).
The PROLA Cornell mirror site server, which resides in Rhodes Hall, contains the electronic counterpart of the Physical Reviews and Reviews of Modern Physics from 1893 to 1999. The bound journals contain 1,600,000 pages and require 378 linear feet of shelf space in the Physical Sciences Library. This means that if you lined up all the bound journals that PROLA archives, the resulting line of books would be longer than a football field, including both endzones (360 feet)!
The Cornell University library mirror site for the Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA) is located at http://prola.library.cornell.edu/.
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| On the left is a scan of a page from Volume I, Number 1 of The Physical Review. On the right is the same page as found in the Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA). | |
Pat Viele, Physics and Astronomy Librarian
Site: Kristina Buhrman
Hartman, Paul. A Memoir on The Physical Review. NY:AIP Press, 1994.
The Physical Review: the first Hundred Years. H. Henry stroke, ed. NY:AIP Press, 1995.
Phillips, Melba. 1990 "The American Physical society: a Survey of its First 50 Years." American Journal of Physics 58(3): 219-230.
Cornell University Dept. of Physics records, 1876-1994. Rare Manuscripts Collection.
