Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System

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The Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) was originally developed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1969, from a design based on a 1967 information study of physicists at SLAC. The system was designed as a physics database management system (DBMS) to deal with high-energy-physics preprints^[1]. Written in PL/1, SPIRES ran on an IBM mainframe.

In the early 1970's, an evaluation of this system resulted in the decision to implement a new system for use by faculty, staff and students at Stanford University. SPIRES was renamed the Stanford Public Information Retrieval System. The new development took place under a National Science Foundation grant headed by Edwin B. Parker, principal investigator. SPIRES joined forces with the BALLOTS project to create a bibliographic citation retrieval system and quickly evolved into a generalized information retrieval and data base management system that could meet the needs of a large and diverse computing community.

SPIRES was rewritten in PL360, a block structured programming language designed explicitly for IBM/360-compatible hardware. The primary authors were: Thomas H. Martin, Dick Guertin and Bill Kiefer. John Schroeder was the manager of the SPIRES project during this early phase of development.

Eventually, BALLOTS split off from SPIRES and the Research Libraries Group adopted SPIRES as its data base engine while providing a graphical interface to its clients. Socrates was a library circulation management system rooted in SPIRES.

SPIRES became the primary database management system for Stanford University business and student services in the 1980s and 90s. It was also adopted by about two dozen other universities, including installations using the Michigan Terminal System (MTS), and VM/CMS. These universities collaborated through annual meetings of the SPIRES Consortium.

In 2004, SPIRES was migrated off the mainframe onto Unix platforms by means of an IBM-mainframe Emulator. The DBMS now runs on Unicx , Linux or Darwin (operating system) and is available under Mozilla Public License from Stanford University ITS

[edit] SPIRES High Energy Physics database (SPIRES-HEP)

The SPIRES High Energy Physics database (SPIRES-HEP),^[2] installed at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the 1970s^[3], became the first database accessible through the World Wide Web in 1991^[4]. It has since expanded into a joint project of SLAC, Fermilab, and DESY, with mirrors hosted at those institutions as well as at the Institute for High Energy Physics (Russia), the University of Durham (UK), the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University (Japan), and LIPI (Indonesia). This project stores bibliographic information about the literature of the field of High Energy Physics and is an example of academic databases and search engines. It is accessible at SPIRES High Energy Physics database.

[edit] Operating platforms

SPIRES currently runs on lunic, Linux and Darwin (operating system) platforms. Its primary use today is for the world physics communities, and "legacy" data at Stanford University.