The online interactive digital archive to be demonstrated is an exhibit of the Stanford University Libraries: the “Edward A. Feigenbaum Papers.” Although a finished project and product, it is really a prototype of what libraries should be building and hosting to make available materials that record the intellectual life of eminent scholars. The target audiences are people doing historical research, and students examining the history of particular people and ideas. The “Edward A. Feigenbaum Papers” collection primarily concerns his work in artificial intelligence (AI) at Stanford University, and in his public service. It includes administrative and project files, correspondence, proposals, reports, reprints, AI Lab preprints, audio tapes, video tapes, and files on computer programs, including EPAM, DENDRAL, MOLGEN, MYCIN, the language IPL-V, and others. The collection includes papers documenting the histories of the main laboratories in which he did his collaborations: Heuristic Programming Project, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, and SUMEX-AIM. Finally, there are documents related to Feigenbaum's public service to the US Air Force (as Chief Scientist), the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The physical materials are stored in 78 boxes, with access delays of days. In the online version, all materials have been scanned into PDF files with OCR backing, so that every word of most materials is searchable by keywords, using a Google-like search. Other navigation tools offer alternate paths of access, including a “similarity” search based on word frequencies in documents. Every item is downloadable by the user. This digital archive was built using the Zotero software for the editing and annotation of metadata (done by Feigenbaum); and collection management software developed by Stanford Libraries’ Digital Libraries Systems & Services (DLSS).
