News from the Library: Access to CERN Council documents

Records of the CERN Council and its Committees are now more easily available thanks to a digitisation and cataloguing project carried out by the CERN Archive team following the CERN Council's decision in September 2008 to have all paper copies of their past documents scanned and made available electronically. Over 12,000 official documents, most of them available in both English and French, are now available here.

Optical character recognition means that the full texts, as well as the cataloguing information (metadata), are searchable - just place the prefix "fulltext:" before your search term in CDS, e.g. "fulltext:Austria". Searching the metadata for "Austria" would find just four records, while the fulltext search finds 3,320. Various combinations of metadata and fulltext searching are possible to make your search as precise as you wish; for more details see the CDS Search Guide.

First meeting of the CERN Council in 1955.

Documents from the Council and its Committees that were created before 1 April 2009 are still governed by the old access restrictions, with 30-year closure periods for all except non-confidential Council records (closed for 5 years). However, new rules approved by the Council in March 2009 now make many more documents publicly available immediately after the Council Sessions (see the Council web pages).

by CERN Library