Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

                                    

                         COLLECTIONS AND INDEXES





     ACHRE has assembled an enormous collection of records and

secondary sources documenting the basic activities and issues in

the history of federal government involvement in human radiation

experiments.  The Advisory Committee's collection is the only

repository of substantive documentation from all the government

agencies involved and from outside the government, and is thus

the broadest source of information for the citizen starting his

or her own research.  The ACHRE collection will be deposited

essentially intact in the National Archives, including (to the

extent feasible) the electronic finding aids.



     ACHRE has constructed several indexes to its collection, the

primary ones being databases controlling the document collection,

the publication collection, and information on experiments.  The

indexing in these collections has relied on some basic reference

thesauri, and these are included in this gopher under Terms and

References.  Experiments are indexed by principal investigator,

location, sponsor, and date, but are given only brief

descriptions that do not include the more detailed information

(for example, radiation used or subject consent) included in the

database.  Similarly, the research document collection is

represented by brief content descriptions that contain only

summary information--none of the collection inventories or

descriptions of individual documents that are part of that

database are included.  On the other hand, the publications

collection is essentially a standard bibliography, and its

entries contain all the information recorded in that database..