Scientists today communicate at meetings, by telephone, and ever more by electronic mail, to the neglect of means that leave a permanent record. The communication that is committed to paper is more ephemeral. Even the traditional, rigorous standards for the keeping of notebooks in the laboratory, the observatory, and the field are relaxing. In short, even as scientific work of historical importance grows richer in volume, in complexity of detail, and in intricacy of organization, the evidence of traditional kinds that will be available to the historian of this science are changing and becoming more ephemeral. The most conspicuous of the new methods arise from the possibility of interviewing scientists about their work and its settings and consequences.
Interviews generate a different kind of evidence.
At one level, of course, transcripts of interviews are documents like any others, which is to say, they must be treated with the skepticism and subjected to the comparative tests, the cross checking, appropriate with any memoir. On the other hand, interviews repeated with the same respondent over a period of time, and sets of interviews with respondents whose work is related, can offer the historian inimitable strengths. Furthermore, interviews are complementary to more traditional, archival research. Indeed, they are typically the only way to locate recent written materials. Interviewing is but one out of an armamentarium of new methods, most of them originating in the social sciences and some permitting quantitative analysis, that are becoming available.