The Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues is a searchable collection of vetted annotations and bibliographic information for resources including books, articles, films, CD-ROMs, and websites pertaining to nuclear topics. Part of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

National Science Digital Library The United States' National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is an open-access online digital library and collaborative network of disciplinary and grade-level focused education providers operated by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Managem ...

(NSDL) and located at

Washington and Lee University , mottoeng = "Not Unmindful of the Future" , established = , type = Private liberal arts university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $2.092 billion (2021) , president = William C. Dudley , provost = Lena Hill , city = Lexington ...

, the

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

provides a balanced selection of high quality resources across many disciplines to a broad audience including students, scholars, professionals, and the general public. Originally focused on the history of the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

, the library has expanded to include the far-reaching consequences of the discovery of atomic energy, including topics such as

nuclear power Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced b ...

, and

nuclear proliferation Nuclear proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons, fissionable material, and weapons-applicable nuclear technology and information to nations not recognized as " Nuclear Weapon States" by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Wea ...

.Frank A. Settle ''et al.'' ''The Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues'' Accessed 06-11-2009.

History

Publicly available since 2001, the Alsos library has been headed since its inception by chemist Dr. Frank Settle. The name Alsos honors the Allied

Alsos Mission The Alsos Mission was an organized effort by a team of British and United States military, scientific, and intelligence personnel to discover enemy scientific developments during World War II. Its chief focus was on the German nuclear energy pr ...

during World War II to discover the extent to which Germany had progressed with its atomic bomb project. Funding has been provided by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

and H. F. Lenfest. Undergraduate students have built and provided the content for the library, supervised by a computer science professor and an editor.

Features

The Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues contains over 3,500 annotations, which have been reviewed by members of its National Advisory Board of experts in many disciplines. Its entries are both searchable as full-text and hierarchically browsable in six major categories: issues, science, warfare, people, places, and disciplines. Bibliographic resources that are available on the Internet have links provided; library locations of non-electronic resources nearest to the user are also available via

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

Partnerships

In order to integrate its extensive bibliographic information with web-based content on nuclear issues, the Alsos team has worked in partnership with other high quality websites to create a gateway to nuclear resources online, Nuclear Pathways. That website provides federated searches of the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues, Atomic Archive, Nuclear Files, and the nuclear chemistry component of ChemCases; resources include bibliographies, biographies, time lines, policy analyses, explanations of the history and science of nuclear weapons, nuclear chemistry lessons, study guides, syllabi, and extensive collections of historical primary source documents, photographs, audio, and film clips.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://alsos.wlu.edu/ *
Washington and Lee University

Atomic Archive

National Science Digital Library

Nuclear Files

Nuclear Pathways
Nuclear technology Science and technology in the United States American digital libraries