Posted on 07 May 2019
The European Science Foundation (ESF) and the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) are pleased to announce that a further 340 files from the ESF fonds have been inventoried and are available for research at the HAEU.
Thanks to this new release, a significant amount of the Foundation’s archival files is now open for consultation. The ESF fonds covers the period since the creation of the Foundation in 1974 until 2005. The ESF archives were transferred from Strasbourg to the HAEU in October 2015, and are currently being processed and inventoried.
The documents recently treated were created by the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences, the Committee for Life and Environmental Sciences, and the Network Committee of the ESF.
The new files concern four scientific programmes carried out by the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences between 1979 and 1993 (International migration in Western Europe, Belief in Government, Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe, and Environment, Science and Society) as well as the first research programme of the Life and Environmental Sciences Standing Committee on Ocean Drilling. They contain the proposals, minutes and reports of meetings of the scientific committees and working groups, as well as working documents, scientific papers, correspondence, final reports and evaluation of the programmes.
The new set of files also includes all the documents pertaining to the Network Committee, which launched the Network scheme in 1985 with the aim of encouraging the development of scientific cooperation in Europe through a new mechanism. As a result a number of short-term international networks were created in the most different fields of human knowledge, ranging from the natural and physical sciences to economics, social sciences and humanities. Each network involved researchers based in different countries, which met periodically in order to coordinate research. The activities of these networks have often lead to proposals for new research programmes. Present in the files are minutes of meetings of the Network Committee concerning the organisation of the networks with documents relating to each one of them: proposals, meetings, workshops, final reports, evaluation and scientific papers.
Through these archival documents the research community can delve into the variety of scientific projects in which eminent European experts cooperated and get an overview of the main activities – by type and by theme of research – carried out within the EU in the spheres of the social, human, life and environmental sciences as well as physical and engineering sciences.
The documents provide the opportunity to study the development of science and scientific cooperation between the principal partners involved in European research and to enhance knowledge on the link between European integration and scientific research within the EU.