Particle Accelerator Science and Technology
PAC Electronic Archiving Project

Starting with the U.S. Particle Accelerator Conference in 1995, electronic submission of papers meant that CDs replaced the 2-5 rather thick volumes of books that would arrive several months later. But it was easy to lose the CDs, and the distribution of our collective wisdom was limited to those who attended the conferences. In 1996 Ilan Ben-Zvi proposed a solution to this problem, and his idea has blossomed into the Joint Accelerator Conferences Website at www.jacow.org. Housed on two servers in Europe and Asia (the American server was found to be unnecessary due to the copious bandwidth between Europe and America), the contents of these CDs from America, Asia and Europe along with specific conferences such as LINAC, Cyclotrons, DIPAC and ICALEPCS can all be found on this common website. Free access, coupled with a comprehensive search engine, have made this website a premier research tool for accelerator scientists.
Based on seed contributions from PAC2001 and the U.S. Department of Energy, an electronic archiving project aimed at scanning and electronically posting all past U.S. PAC proceedings was initiated in 2002. Additional financial support was given to the project by PAC2003, IEEE NPSS, and the APS DPB. Remarkably, these electronically archived paper documents are full-text searchable due to the magic of optical character recognition and Adobe software that maps the text onto the scanned image in the form of PDF documents indistinguishable from their later electronically generated sisters. All past U.S. conferences back to the first in 1965 have been scanned and posted on the JACoW website. Electronic archiving of all past European accelerator conferences is underway, with completion expected sometime in the summer of 2005. Other conferences such as LINAC, Cyclotrons, and Applied Superconductivity are also investigating electronic archiving.
Gerry Jackson has been instrumental in implementing this project. He can be reached at Hbar Technologies LLC, 1275 W Roosevelt Road, Suite 103, West Chicago, IL 60185-4815, Phone: +1 630 231 7077; Fax: +1 630 231 7086; E-mail:gjackson@hbartech.com.