trick a dit:
havent we all read this book?
that should be common knowledge.
I wasn't sure if this Appendix appeared in all editions. This fourth edition was published by MAPS. But I'm sure many of the members here already heard about this Collection through the Erowid and/or MAPS newsletters. I just hadn't heard about these archives before until yesterday.
It's really cool that this Collection has been preserved this way. Here's the whole story, as told by Earth:
Albert Hofmann's Collection of LSD and Psilocybin-Related Papers
In the early 1950s, Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Switzerland began building a collection of LSD and psilocybin-related articles as part of Albert Hofmann's work with these substances. Sandoz continued adding to this collection for nearly 35 years, gathering more than 4,000 documents on the topic. The collection now consists of a nearly complete archive of historical LSD and psilocybin journal articles from the late 1940s through the early 1980s, as well as a small number of student theses, newspaper clippings, shipping manifests, and similar unique items.
As the library was being built, each newly published article was acquired by Sandoz, given a unique identifying number (“LSD 1” through “LSD 3758”), and then added to the collection in numerical order. Somewhere along the line, the articles were taped into matching binders carefully labelled with the LSD numbers they contained. Two sets of hand-typed index books, in the tradition of card catalogs, were also created. The first index simply listed the basic reference (title, journal, author, publication date) for each sequentially numbered article. The second index listed references and abstracts, again ordered by the master LSD numbers. These binders – 79 containing LSD articles, 9 containing psilocybin articles, 13 abstract books and 9 reference books – were then stored in a library at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals where they were available to Albert Hofmann and other researchers working with LSD.
In the mid 1990s, as Sandoz was preparing to merge with pharmaceutical competitor Ciba, the collection was scheduled to be destroyed. With Dr. Hofmann's approval, the Sandoz board granted the collection to the Albert Hofmann Foundation (
www.hofmann.org) and in the fall of 1996 the bound books were shipped to Los Angeles. During the late 1990s, the Albert Hofmann Foundation, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and the Heffter Research Institute began the collaborative process of creating a digital index of the papers.
In March 2002 editors from Erowid moved the physical collection to their home in Skylonda, where they spent several weeks preparing the documents for digitization. With the help of Brandy from MAPS, thousands of articles were carefully removed from their original binding. In many cases this was as simple as wiggling the article, at which point the binding tape, no longer adhesive after 35 years, would simply release. In other cases, the tape was carefully cut to allow the article to be removed.
The documents were then evaluated, one by one, to determine whether they were in good enough condition to withstand the process of mass scanning. Hundreds of the more delicate articles were set aside to be scanned by hand, while the rest were sent to a commercial scanning company. After digitization, each article was slipped into an archival quality plastic sleeve and placed, back in sequential order, into new binders. The original binders, now empty of papers, remain with the collection.
The current collection consists of more than 4,000 individual documents, approximately 80% English and 20% foreign language. Of these, perhaps a few hundred full texts are missing, although in most of these cases an abstract or summary is available. In addition, about 10% of the physical documents have some sort of defect or problem that reduces their readability, and a few are really quite unreadable.
Working on this project provided the very interesting opportunity to sift through articles about a wide gamut of “scientific research”. Topics range from the prosaic, like the use of LSD in psychotherapy and the hubbub over chromosome damage; to the creative, studying the effects of LSD on artistic expression or handwriting; to the bizarre and unexpected, like submerging snails in an LSD solution and recording their reaction.
This library is particularly valuable as a historical archive because of the rarity of many of the articles. Pubmed, the primary public U.S. database of scientific articles (pubmed.org), does not list any articles published earlier than 1964, is missing many articles up through the late 1960s, and doesn't include abstracts for many papers published earlier than 1990. University libraries are beginning to cull their physical collections, making it increasingly difficult to get public access to older articles from even the major journals. In fact, over the years, many articles about LSD and psilocybin have been cut out of journals or entire issues have been stolen by interested parties. This collection contains many articles which are nearly impossible to find in either physical or digital format – including older articles, and articles from uncommon, out-of-print, and foreign journals. We're pleased to be able to take advantage of the hard work Sandoz put into collecting these papers over the years and hope it will help ensure that future students and researchers have access to the historical record of early psychedelic research.
The direct costs of this project (supplies, scanning costs and outside labor) were funded by MAPS, through a grant from the Promind Foundation. Erowid's work on the project has been conducted as part of their general mission, supported by memberships and individual donations.
. thanks though, im sure once i finally get to it, these resources will be amazingly helpful
