Sir

We would like to correct any impression of neglect of Britain's rich scientific archive heritage that might have been given by the News feature “The History Man”, about the US private collector Jeremy Norman (Nature 411, 732; 2001). On the contrary, the United Kingdom is fortunate in having universities and national institutions that show an active interest in collecting science archives.

The Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust, for example, have supported the preservation and cataloguing of such materials over many years. The Wellcome Trust has recently established a Research Resources in Medical History scheme, with £1 million ($US1.4 million) for the year 2001–2002 to support important documentary collections.

Archives in universities, including contemporary science archives, have benefited from major funding programmes run by the Higher Education Funding Councils. A recent award from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund will allow a group of science institutions to mount a large number of catalogues of scientists' archives on the web as part of Access to Archives, a vast online catalogue at http://www.a2a.pro.gov.uk.

Many important personal scientific papers are held in libraries and repositories in the United Kingdom, some having been catalogued by the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists (NCUACS). This work is supported by several scientific societies, trusts and foundations, preserving a significant part of contemporary British science and biomedicine in a major collaborative effort.

For the long-term benefit, such papers are best housed in properly resourced public repositories in their country of origin, rather than in private hands. Archivists, who will always have to struggle to maintain their budgets in a competitive world, will be greatly helped by widespread recognition of that basic principle.