  Science, especially large-scale basic research, is a collaborative endeavor,
often drawing on the skills of people from a wide variety of disciplines. These
people include not just scientists, but also administrators, engineers, and
many others. Fermilab, a Department of Energy National Laboratory and the
United States' premier particle physics laboratory, exemplifies this kind of
research; many of its high-energy physics experiments involve hundreds of
collaborators from all over the world. The Fermilab Archives seeks to document
the history of the lab and the unique scientific research its staff and
visitors perform. Adequately documenting the lab's work often requires us to go
far beyond things like the writings and correspondence of scientists to also
capture the administrative and social histories of the experiments and the
context in which they were performed. At Fermilab, we have sought to capture
these elements of the lab's activities through an oral history program that
focuses on support staff as well as physicists and collection development
choices that recognize the importance of records documenting the cultural life
of the lab. These materials are not merely supplementary, but rather essential
documentation of the many types of labor that go into the planning and
execution of an experiment or the construction of an accelerator and the
context in which this work is performed.
