Under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the ICOS has grown to a database containing fully cataloged and indexed records describing 3,250 collections with many more in process. The ICOS is a truly international catalog. Efforts to strengthen the foreign component of the catalog proved very successful. Our contacts sent us information on around 1,300 collections not known to us before, and updates on others from Australia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. The grant funding ended in mid-1996, but work continues under funding from AIP and the Friends of the Center for History of Physics.
Staff continue to pursue contacts abroad for additional records.
This effort should be completed by mid-1998. The majority of records are uploaded into RLIN as they are cataloged, thus making the indexed information available to researchers online. In addition, the Center plans to make the in-house catalog available on the Internet via AIP s World Wide Web site. Once the backlog of cataloging is complete a CD-ROM version of the ICOS will also be considered.