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How to Search

The NRAO/AUI Archives contains hundreds of thousands of individual documents, photographs, oral histories and electronic records documenting the lives and work of individual scientists, as well as materials on NRAO’s historical development, institutional history, instrument construction and participation in multi-institutional collaborations.

Nearly 12,000 of these items have been digitized and are now available on this website. Many more items reside in the physical archives at NRAO headquarters in Charlottesville, VA and are available to in-person researchers or may be digitized upon request.

We hope that this website will enable researchers to see the breadth of material available in our archives and access a selection of our records in digital format. We will be adding to the digitized collections as time and staffing permit.

There are two main ways to search for items in our collections:

  1. If you are looking for items that may have been digitized (or originally existed in electronic form), we recommend that you start with our Popular Searches. If you wish to do a more detailed search, you can also use the Advanced Search.
  2. If the material you seek has not been digitized, you will need to review our Finding Aids. Many items in our physical collections have been individually listed in our Finding Aids, others are listed only at the box or folder level. In either case, we would be happy to speak with you in more detail about what is contained in the collections.

If you wish to review non-digital material, would like to make an appointment to visit the NRAO/AUI Archives or have any questions about our collections, please contact us at 1-434-296-0203, via email at ebouton_at_nrao.edu or on our Contact Us page.