IsisCB Cumulative - Open Access to History of Science Bibliography, 1913-1975

A new open access reference resource was released this month: IsisCB Cumulative, a digitized version of the Isis Cumulative Bibliography of the History of Science, spanning sixty years from 1913 to 1975. The full text is available as seven large HTML files corresponding to the seven volumes of the Isis Cumulative Bibliography covering that period.

  • IsisCB Cumulative is a companion to IsisCB Explore, a research tool launched last year that includes data from the Isis Bibliographies from 1974 to the present.
  • IsisCB Cumulative is the result of two years of effort that included scanning, transcribing, and encoding 5000 pages of text. The files contain nearly 154,000 citation records to works in the history of science, all of which are classified by historians of science and subject bibliographers. These include citations to about 83,000 articles, 44,000 books, 20,000 reviews, and 6,000 chapters.
  • The current release of these volumes as individual HTML files is meant to provide temporary access to the digitized data, which will eventually be added to the IsisCB Explore service.
  • IsisCB Cumulative and IsisCB Explore contain data accumulated and published annually and semi-annually in the journal Isis since its founding. Established by George Sarton, this bibliography has been continued by various scholars and librarians, including John Neu, Magda Whitrow, Joy Harvey, and, currently, Stephen Weldon.
  • The online publication of IsisCB Cumulative was made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the History of Science Society, the University of Oklahoma Libraries, and the University of Oklahoma History of Science Department. The digitization efforts were overseen by Stephen Weldon, Sylwester Ratowt, and Conal Tuohy. Tuohy (see his website) parsed the transcribed text and created the HTML file (gitHub for the project). For more information about the Isis Bibliographies see the project’s website isiscb.org. Individuals can also contact Stephen Weldon, editor of IsisCB, directly at spweldon@ou.edu.