PASADENA, Calif. -More than 900 scientific and nonscientific
documents of one of the most influential intellects in the modern
era, Albert Einstein, will soon be available online for the first
time.

The Einstein Archives Online website, at
http://www.alberteinstein.info, will also be accompanied by an
extensive database of archival information. It will be launched on
May 19 during a daylong symposium on his life and work, to be held at
the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The new website is the result of an ambitious cooperative effort
between the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem and the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute
of Technology. It will enable access to some 3,000 high-quality
digitized images. Thirty-nine documents will also be provided (in PDF
format) as they appear in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein,
published in German by Princeton University Press, with historical
and scientific annotations in English; some of the documents are
accompanied by English translations.

An extensive archival database and finding aid will allow for the
direct searching and browsing of more than 40,000 records of Einstein
and Einstein-related documents. These concern his scientific and
nonscientific writings, his professional and personal correspondence,
notebooks, travel diaries, personal documents, and third-party items.

The website was developed in collaboration with the Information
Technology and Photo-Reprography Departments of the Hebrew
University’s Jewish National & University Library (JNUL), the David
and Fela Shapell Digitization Project at the JNUL, and with Princeton
University Press. The archival database will present records for all
items that have been edited and annotated by scholars, and that have
appeared since 1987 in The Collected Papers. These will include some
500 items that were not part of the original collection, but that
were uncovered during the past 25 years. The eight volumes that are
available so far contain Einstein’s writings and correspondence from
his youth to age 40. They include his major papers on the theory of
special relativity, general relativity, the quantum theory of light
and matter, as well as a wealth of lesser-known contributions to many
aspects of science, education, international reconciliation, Zionism,
and pacifism.

Einstein’s personal papers were bequeathed to the Hebrew University
in his last will and testament of 1950. The Albert Einstein Archives
has been housed at the Hebrew University’s JNUL since 1982.

The Einstein Papers Project at Caltech is a multidisciplinary
research and editorial team engaged in the collection, selection, and
scholarly annotation of The Collected Papers, an edition of 25
planned volumes of Einstein’s writings and correspondence.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was envisaged by its founders as a
“university of the Jewish people.” Its foundation stone was laid in
1918, and its doors opened in 1925. Today, its student body totals
around 23,000 and its tenured academic faculty numbers 1,200. The
university is Israel’s leading academic center for research and
postgraduate study.

Founded in 1891, Caltech has an enrollment of some 2,000 students,
and a faculty of about 280 professorial members, 65 research members,
and some 560 postdoctoral scholars. Over the years, 30 Nobel Prizes
and four Crafoord Prizes have been awarded to faculty members and
alumni.

The Jewish National & University Library is the central library of
the Hebrew University and the national library of the Jewish people
and the State of Israel. Founded in 1892 as a world center for the
preservation of books relating to Jewish thought and culture, it
assumed the additional functions of a general university library in
1920.