JSC History Collection - Background

The very beginnings of the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) history collection were assembled when the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (now JSC) opened in Houston in the early 1960s. Their charter, originally, was to write and publish chronologies and histories of each manned space flight program. Most histories were published by GPO (Government Printing Office) as SP's (special publications) in the 4000 (history) series. They include chronologies and histories on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and ASTP (Apollo Soyuz Test Project). For a listing of all NASA history publications available from both GPO and on the web, go to the NASA History Office web page at the following address.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/publicat.htm

In the course of writing JSC-authored histories, historians collected large amounts of what were referred to as historians' source files. These were copies of documents that the historians collected in their research. The history office staff organized and maintained all of these source data, including interviews done for the various publications.

By the 1980s the collection had grown to over 1000 shelf feet organized, primarily, by space flight program. A database was created to index the entire collection item by item, in an attempt to increase access to these documents. A second database was added that would describe the holdings of the collection down to the folder title level.

Today, these files contain source documents and interviews numbering more than 1.5 million items. The collection is currently housed at the University of Houston - Clear Lake where its staff continues to update and modify the collection and the databases. Currently, about 62,000 individual items are indexed on the History database while the other million-plus documents are described on the Archive database. Both databases are available through this Website.

Description of the materials included in the JSC History Collection

Information regarding the JSC materials housed at the National Archives and Records Administration

Information on accessing the materials in the JSC History Collection

History Search Index
History Search Index User Guide

Archive Search Index
Archive Search Index User Guide