Formalizing Informal Communication: An Archaeology of the Early Pre-Web Preprint Infrastructure at CERN

Abstract: This article deals with the early development of preprint communication in high-energy physics, specifically with how preprint communication was formalized in the early 1960s at CERN. It employs a sociological conception of infrastructures to ask which practices and technologies of communication structured the use of preprints in high-energy physics at the time and subsequently solidified into the research community's communication and information infrastructure. The investigation conducts a media archaeology of the uses and understandings of the preprint medium in three historical layers to explore the sociocultural specificities that became inscribed into the preprint infrastructure at CERN: 1. The use of preprints as separate copies of papers accepted for publication and distributed informally to members of societies and academies in the early-20th century to make the content immediately available without delay of publication, 2. The use of preprints in postwar physics as media to privately and informally share practical instructions and theoretical tools in the fast-moving current of theoretical physics, and 3. As a formalized information system developed at the CERN library in the early 1960s, which treated preprints as public current awareness tools for the benefit of the whole HEP community to inform its members of recent progress in the field. The article concludes with a discussion of the infrastructural regimes that shaped the early pre-Web history of preprint communication as well as an outlook to the research program to comprehensively study the infrastructuring of preprint communication in high-energy physics.