Grant Awarded to give access to the Rowland Papers
The UCI Libraries have received a grant to arrange and catalog the papers of Nobel Laureate F. Sherwood Rowland. The papers, donated by Rowland in 2008 and 2010, document his relentless efforts over more than 30 years to educate other scientists, citizens, and policymakers about global atmospheric problems. In 1995, Rowland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Mario Molina and Paul Crutzen, "for their work on atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone."
The Rowland papers will be available for research in early 2011 in the Department of Special Collections and Archives. Scholars and students will find a wealth of primary sources on the policy changes and controversies surrounding ozone depletion, including correspondence, research files, publication and speech manuscripts, and videos.
Rowland was, with Molina, the first to warn that CFCs released into the atmosphere were depleting the earth's critical ozone layer. Research on CFCs and stratospheric ozone led in the 1970s to legislation in the United States, Canada, and Scandinavia regulating the manufacture and use of CFCs, and in 1978 to the Montreal Protocol of the United Nations Environmental Program, the first agreement for controlling and ameliorating environmental damage to the global atmosphere. The terms of the Montreal Protocol were strengthened in 1992 to attain a complete elimination of further CFC production by the year 1996.
Included among the many outstanding professional accomplishments documented in Rowland's papers is his service as foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences (1994 to 2002) where he co-founded the Interacademy Panel on International Issues, an organization of the world's national sciences academies. Rowland came to UCI in 1964 as the first chair of the Department of Chemistry and now serves as the Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and Earth System Science.
The UCI Libraries partnered with the California Digital Library and eight other institutions in the state to seek the competitive grant, which supports the processing of 33 environmentally-related collections. Funding for the project, Uncovering California's Environmental Collections: A Collaborative Approach, was awarded by the Council on Library and Information Resources with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please contact Dawn Schmitz, Archivist (schmitzd@uci.edu or x45753).
Above right: Sherwood Rowland teaching a chemistry class, December 1973.