The Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) is a database management system developed by Stanford University. It is used by universities, colleges and research institutions. The first website in North America was created to allow remote users access to its database.

History

SPIRES was originally developed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1969, from a design based on a 1967 information study of physicists at SLAC. The system was designed as a

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

database management system (DBMS) to deal with high-energy-physics preprints. Written in

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. I ...

, SPIRES ran on an IBM System/360. In the early 1970s, an evaluation of this system resulted in the decision to implement a new system for use by faculty, staff and students at Stanford University. SPIRES was renamed the Stanford Public Information Retrieval System. The new development took place under a National Science Foundation grant headed by Edwin B. Parker, principal investigator. SPIRES joined forces with the BALLOTS project to create a bibliographic citation retrieval system and quickly evolved into a generalized information retrieval and data base management system that could meet the needs of a large and diverse computing community. SPIRES was rewritten in

PL360 PL360 (or PL/360) is a system programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth and written by Wirth, Joseph W. Wells Jr., and Edwin Satterthwaite Jr. for the IBM System/360 computer at Stanford University. A description of PL360 was published in ea ...

, a block structured programming language designed explicitly for System/360-compatible hardware. The primary authors were Thomas H. Martin, Dick Guertin and Bill Kiefer. John Schroeder was the manager of the SPIRES project during this early phase of development. Eventually, BALLOTS split off from SPIRES and the

Research Libraries Group The Research Libraries Group (RLG) was a U.S.-based library consortium that existed from 1974 until its merger with the OCLC library consortium in 2006. RLG developed the Eureka interlibrary search engine, the RedLightGreen database of bibliograp ...

adopted SPIRES as its data base engine while providing a graphical interface to its clients. ''Socrates'' was a library circulation management system rooted in SPIRES. SPIRES became the primary database management system for Stanford University business and student services in the 1980s and 1990s. It was also adopted by about two dozen other universities, including installations using the

Michigan Terminal System The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) is one of the first time-sharing computer operating systems.. Developed in 1967 at the University of Michigan for use on IBM S/360-67, S/370 and compatible mainframe computers, it was developed and used by a con ...

(MTS), and

VM/CMS VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The following versions ...

. These universities collaborated through annual meetings of the SPIRES Consortium. In 2004, SPIRES was migrated off the mainframe onto Unix platforms by means of an System/360 emulator developed by Dick Guertin. The DBMS now runs on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

and is available under

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

SPIRES High Energy Physics database (SPIRES-HEP)

The SPIRES High Energy Physics database (SPIRES-HEP), installed at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the 1970s, became the first website in North America and the first database accessible through the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

in 1991. It has since expanded into a joint project of SLAC,

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been opera ...

, and DESY, with mirrors hosted at those institutions as well as at the

Institute for High Energy Physics State Research Center – Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) is a research organisation in Protvino (near Moscow, Moscow Oblast), Russia. It was established in 1963. The institute is known for the particle accelerator U-70 synchrotron ...

(Russia), the

University of Durham Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by royal charte ...

(UK), the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University (Japan), and the

Indonesian Institute of Sciences The Indonesian Institute of Sciences ( id, Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, or LIPI) was the governmental authority for science and research in Indonesia. It consists of 47 research centers in the fields ranging from social to natural scien ...

LIPI (Indonesia). This project stores bibliographic information about the literature of the field of

High Energy Physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standa ...

and is an example of

academic databases and search engines This article contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific and ...

. SPIRES is, as of 2012, being replaced by INSPIRE-HEP, a modern system based on

Invenio Invenio is an open source software framework for large-scale digital repositories that provides the tools for management of digital assets in an institutional repository and research data management systems. The software is typically used for ope ...

software. INSPIRE is run by a collaboration of the physics labs at CERN, DESY,

and

SLAC SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Departme ...

, and interacts closely with HEP publishers,

arXiv.org arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of s ...

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

Astrophysics Data System The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over 16 million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources. Abstracts are available free online for almost all articles, and full scanned ...

, Particle Data Group, and other information resources.INSPIRE Project Information
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Operating platforms

SPIRES currently runs on

and

platforms. Its primary use today is for the world

communities, and "legacy" data at Stanford University. SPIRES runs under emulation of the original ORVYL operating system. The emulators are written primarily in "C" compiled by 32-bit "gcc" or "g++" depending upon architectures (ppc or i386). The SPIRES engine is less than one-megabyte in size, but performs all the searching, maintenance, and formatting of databases. A 270k emulator runs a 973k SPIRES. In 2017, the Emulators were adapted by Dick Guertin to become 64-bit programs dealing with 32-bit SPIRES.

References

{{reflist

External links

SPIRES software at Stanford ITS
Stanford University Bibliographic databases and indexes Full-text scholarly databases