Policies

The user agrees to give proper acknowledgment to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives (CSHL Archives) and further agrees to secure permission in advance from the CSHL Archives to publish or broadcast any item, in whole or in part, from its collections. This permission may be granted in so far and only in so far as the rights of the CSHL Archives are concerned.

The user agrees to indemnify and hold harmless the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives, its officers, employees and agents from and against all suits, claims, actions and expenses arising out of the use of reproductions provided by the CSHL Archives.

The CSHL Archives claims only physical ownership of most archival material. Persons wishing to publish or broadcast this material must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants of copyrights.

United States Copyright Law

The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement.

The CSHL Archives reserves the right to refuse to accept a duplication request if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the request would involve violation of copyright law. Copyright law protects unpublished as well as published materials.

Proper Citation of Archival Materials

All materials used in any type of publication or production must be credited with the following credit line:
Courtesy of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

Please e-mail archives@cshl.edu if you have any questions.

The primary intention of the digital preservation program is to preserve the intellectual and cultural heritage important to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as well as the history of molecular biology and genetics in general. CSHL Library and Archives recognizes its responsibility to preserve digital collections in support of teaching, learning, scholarship, and research. The program’s objectives are to:

• Maintain and develop processes and systems to capture, manage, preserve, find, and make accessible digital materials now and into the future
• Identify, through systematic selection, digital assets to be preserved across new generations of technologies
• Include in the scope of the program materials that originated in digital form (born digital) and those that were converted to digital form through a digitization process
• Provide context for digital materials by creating the metadata necessary to understand them
• Identify and support the core working team to develop and operate the digital archive and provide requisite training and development as needed
• Comply with prevailing community standards for digital preservation and access
• Explore collaborative opportunities to collect and preserve digital materials so as to make the best use of available resources and avoid duplicative efforts

Digital Preservation Policy (pdf)

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Library and Archives are a major source of documents on the history of classical genetics, the origins of molecular biology, the development of human genetics, the connections of the life sciences to evolution, and the applications of the life sciences to society. The Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor began developing in the late nineteenth century and was joined in 1904 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Station for Experimental Evolution, later the Carnegie Department of Genetics. The two institutions merged in 1963 to create the modern CSHL.

The contributions to the life sciences from scientists at Cold Spring Harbor have been stunning in their scope.

Not all of the contributions at Cold Spring Harbor, however, were positive ones. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, especially under the leadership of Charles Davenport, the Eugenics Record Office was one of many institutions in the United States that promoted a branch of applied science called eugenics. First conceived of and named by Francis Galton in 1883, eugenics was seen as an ethical or moral movement to apply the knowledge of heredity to human betterment. In Great Britain it led to what is called positive eugenics, which encouraged marriages between those who had good health, longevity, high intelligence, talents in the arts and humanities, leadership, compassion and other traits that were considered worthy of perpetuating in the world’s populations. In the United States a different type of eugenics, called negative eugenics, emerged in the post-Civil War era that was concerned with perceived “social failures” of individuals, including mental disabilities, innate poor health, short life expectancy, pauperism, psychosis, and criminality. Proponents of negative eugenics believed those traits were driven by “defective protoplasm” (in the late nineteenth century) and “defective heredity” (in the first half of the 20th century) that should be bred out of the human population.

A key contributor to the eugenics movement in the United States was the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor. It was an off-shoot of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, under the overall direction of Davenport, and led by Harry Laughlin, until it was closed in 1939 due to the discredited science it promoted. The collections of eugenic documents, articles, and books in the CSHL Archives will therefore reflect the biases of the American eugenics movement at the time, and its influence on the USA, Europe and other parts of the world. In its most extreme form, American eugenics thinking influenced the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust and contributed to forced sterilization legislation in many States of the US.

Those using the CSHL Library and Archives should bear in mind that much of the early materials on eugenics uses terminology and phrasing that we recognize today as sexist, racist, classist, ableist, and ideologically repellent . With that said, those interested in the history, sociology, or philosophy of science will find a range of views on eugenics in these collections.