INIS in My Life

The first time I learned about INIS was in 1975, when I began my career as a junior researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP). At that time, I could not imagine that my future life would be so closely linked to this unique system. Having begun scientific work at IHEP, I faced a serious problem of lack of access to foreign nuclear information that was a vital prerequisite for any scientific activity. At the time, there were only 3 main ways to access foreign information: the use of the Russian information system Referativnyi Zhurnal; a subscription to the leading nuclear journals such as Physical Review and Nuclear Physics; and direct personal contacts, mainly at international conferences. This was obviously insufficient, and access to pre-prints and reports was necessary, considering that at that time there was a significant time lag in published journal articles. Receiving the first magnetic tape with INIS records was a momentous occasion for scientists at my Institute. The first use of INIS information demonstrated the many innovative ideas and thoughts used to develop INIS. Obviously, at that time, there was no other nuclear information system that could compete with INIS on completeness of coverage, the volume of the information, and on the number of people involved in data collection and processing. Even now, I continue to be amazed that from the first day of operations, INIS started collecting NCL documents. As a result, the INIS NCL archive, with over 700 000 documents, was created and many of the documents from the NCL archive remain relevant to modern nuclear research