How physics libraries organized research before the internet changed everything

A historian traces how physicists classified and organized preprints in the decades before arXiv emerged as the central repository for physics research. Understanding this history reveals how access to information and the ability to stay current with new results has always been tied to social position — who had access to libraries, who knew the right people, who could afford to travel to conferences.

Classification systems aren't neutral: they determine who can find information and who stays invisible. For most of physics history, the gatekeepers who organized preprints also decided whose work was easy to discover and whose was buried — a form of power that only became visible once a central, searchable system made everyone's research equally findable.