You can help

The Archive will get better with your input, information, and enthusiasm. Our collection is internationally recognized as a helpful compendium to shed more light on the IYPT, and a useful resource for future participants, team leaders, organizers, and researchers in physics education. There are many ways you can help us to reach the ultimate goal of a having any important IYPT-related detail just a few clicks away. This will help advance the visibility and historical transparency of the IYPT, share its expertise with a wider community, and contribute to physics education at an international scale.


Donate

The Archive is a non-profit initiative. Our biggest constraint to growth is a lack of financing to cover the necessary operational costs. All expenses incurred for our activities are so far financed only privately. The elementary but financially challenging costs include the following:

  1. paying external developers for the necessary web applications (e.g., our specialized submission manager solutions.iypt.org implemented in 2011 by Kraków-based startup odpo.eu);
  2. hiring a collaborator to digitize photographs and documents, do technical editing, translation, data mining, writing factsheets, and similar tasks;
  3. travel costs for the projects that cannot be otherwise operated distantly (e.g., a dedicated international trip made in 2011 to collect materials from the IYPT 1995, including the raw drafts of a historical proceedings book, or a planned trip to collect documents from the storage facility M-1 of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History);
  4. purchasing valuable auction lots (e.g., memorabilia of the earliest IYPTs acquired from external professional collectors in 2011 and 2012);
  5. paying to digitize the assets reposed at external archives (e.g., the documents at the Czech National Library digitized in 2010);
  6. supporting partner projects, e.g., to make information videos about the IYPT or to print booklets;
  7. shipping, office, IT, and other costs that go on growing.

Even a small donation to the project would become a real, sensible, and immediate support for our mission.


Contribute with your materials

Any new knowledge in the IYPT history—even very small—makes a difference, and has a big effect towards learning where to look further.

If you happen to know a relevant link or a good journal reference, you run a webpage, or have a sudden commentary—just let us know.

You have been a participant, an organizer, a juror, a visitor, or a volunteer at an IYPT or regional YPT? You feel that you may help in clarifying factual details of an old event, or help us fill gaps? Please drop us a line and allow us to ask you a few questions.

Any records have survived in your private collection, like reports, diplomas, badges, books, photos, newspaper cuttings, organizational documents, audio or video tapes? We would be glad if you could contact us, as all of such materials are of importance for the Archive.

You were considering launching a blog, sharing online your photos or slides, writing a report, or submitting an IYPT-inspired paper to a journal? Do not hesitate and start today. We are interested to put a link to your project and index your contribution.


Act and volunteer

Open volunteer positions at IYPT Archive
Description, project priorities:
  1. preserving, mainly electronically, IYPT-related records and artifacts, such as documents, photos, articles, books, transcripts of meetings, manuscripts, letters, diplomas, from IYPT proper and from regional competitions,
  2. locating and digitizing items from personal or institutional archives, or libraries, mainly through loan; handling all stages of negotiation, acquisition, storage, copying, and returning the items back; negotiating with authors and publishers the permissions for non-profit, research and educational use of the records,
  3. handling a wide range of information for permanent backup and safekeeping; reverting the ongoing data loss while original webpages are discontinued, personal collections of high-value ephemera are thrown away, or libraries get rid of old items,
  4. authenticating, organizing, and categorizing items for facile web retrieval, with an eventual aim of developing a searchable database,
  5. acquiring, verifying and documenting information through “investigative journalism”, establishing contacts with first-hand participants and organizers to directly clarify with them obscure details, and reliably keep track of the new knowledge collected,
  6. preparing reports and writing articles for Wikipedia, printed journals, or the IYPT’s official site, but also writing short descriptions, summaries, and keyword indexes,
  7. proofreading and reviewing sources skeptically, and identifying factual inaccuracies throughout the collection,
  8. exploring new potential sources for data of high historical or research value, and identifying people to be contacted or items to be traced and preserved,
  9. translating from a variety of languages into English, and
  10. providing reference assistance, to help people in locating the details they need.
Aside from many smaller projects, there are more time-consuming goals, with examples as:
  1. helping Andrzej Nadolny with typesetting the retrospective proceedings for the 8th IYPT (1995) and requiring attention to details and knowledge of software, or
  2. establishing, in English language, a coherent compendium of full-text documents from individual IYPTs and thus requiring an amount of careful Russian-English translation.
  3. arranging a research visit to the storage facility M-1 at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. This storage facility preserves the record boxes with documentation on the IYPTs 1988-1991 produced and committed by the Division for Students of the Komsomol’s Central Committee (Отдел учащейся молодежи ЦК ВЛКСМ).

Just contact us. No deadlines set, no specific skills required, no formal application necessary.

Your areas of interests can be in interviewing people, journalism, writing good scientific prose, podcasting and multimedia editing, translation, cataloguing, but also in CMS and UI programming, online database applications, digital imaging, and quite naturally in cutting-edge physics education research or physics promotion activities.

We offer an opportunity to learn through practice, to establish new contacts in multidisciplinary international environment, and to distantly develop skills in a professional setting. A success in little projects means more than just fun. It means a good step in establishing a proven track record for a future career.