Contact Us
For research assistance please contact the Archivists at 630-840-2543 (WH3SE) or 630-840-5177 (History & Archives House) or 630-840-2623 (FAX). You may also submit an Archives Request online or pick up a form outside the Archives on WH3SE.
Meet the Fermilab Archivists
Valerie J. Higgins (vhiggins@fnal.gov) received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a minor in History from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2008. She received her MLS with a specialization in Archives and Records Management from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2010. She has worked as Project Archivist at Indiana University's Lilly Library and Assistant Archivist at the Ryerson and Burnham Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago. Higgins became Fermilab Archivist and Historian in 2012.
Adrienne W. Kolb (adrienne@fnal.gov) received her Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the University of New Orleans in 1972. She volunteered at the Los Alamos County Historical Museum in New Mexico before becoming Fermilab's Archivist in 1983. She became Fermilab Archivist and Historian in 2011. She is the author or co-author of numerous publications on the history of Fermilab and the cancelled Superconducting Super Collider. Kolb has also made presentations on the history of these laboratories in sessions of the American Physical Society and the History of Science Society.
Some of her most significant publications include:
- "The Mirage of the World Accelerator for World Peace and the Origins of the SSC, 1953-1983," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 24/1 (1993), pp. 101-124 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
- "A New Frontier in the Chicago Suburbs: Settling Fermilab, 1963-72," Illinois Historical Journal, 88/1 (1995), pp. 2-18 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
- "Building Fermilab: A User's Paradise" in 1992 for The Rise of the Standard Model (Cambridge, 1997) (with Robert R. Wilson)
- "The Superconducting Super Collider's Frontier Outpost, 1983-1988," Minerva 38 (2000), 271-310 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
- "Vision to Reality: From Robert R. Wilson's Frontier to Leon M. Lederman's Fermilab," Perspectives in Physics Vol. 5, no. 1 (2003), pp. 67-86 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
- Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (Chicago, 2008) (with Lillian Hoddeson and Catherine Westfall)
- A new book, Tunnel Visions, on the history and demise of the Superconducting Super Collider, co-authored with Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan, is in publication.