TEMP PAGE
Documents dated … which provides a page of quick links to find resources published in individual months going back to 1946.
Searching via specific data in the title, author or keywords fields can be carried out via the following pages:
- Catalogue search returning title and author(s) [for approved guests and above]; or
- Catalogue search within all fields [for HSP Associates only].
A guide to the data structure is in preparation, but the basic format is relatively easy to pick up.
The author field should be self-explanatory.
A simple example of a return from a title field is “1984-0331 [Gua] Baghdad plans big nerve gas offensive”. At the basic level, the title field contains three main elements — a date code, a source code and the document title. The date code is in the form 1984-0331 which represents 31 March 1984. Source codes are bracketed so that [Gua] represents the Guardian (London), [HSP] represents the Harvard Sussex Program, etc. Government and Parliamentary papers use different brackets for the initial code so that {CA} represents Canada, {UK} represents the United Kingdom, etc; these country codes are mostly based on the ISO-3166-2 list (or two-letter internet domain). The source codes can have more than one entry that defines the forum where something is published. For example, a Thai presentation to an OPCW policy making organ would include {TH} [OPCW] in the source code or a Philippines contribution to a BWC meeting would include {PH} [BWC]. This allows for some useful distinctions to be made. A search for OPCW in the title field will bring up every document that has the letters in it. However, searching for {OPCW} will return documents from the Organization as a whole while [OPCW] will return documents presented by others in the context of the OPCW.
The keywords field is harder to summarize. As well as taxonomic codes there are also some working codes in relation to possible future writings. These latter codes are being edited out; while this process is taking place the codes in the keywords field are not being published in this version of the search system. The fileheadings used within SHIB are represented by the fileheading being preceded by shib-, such that shib-F2.2.1.2 brings up records relating to the Pugwash Conferences. However, as this simple search has been set to search for anything starting with the search string, a search for shib-F2.2.1.2 will also produce returns for shib-F2.2.1.22, for example. When the advanced search system has been developed, it should be possible to define searches more specifically.
Example searches that might be carried out to help learn the indexing system include:
- 1984-0307 in the title field — brings up the records of things published on 7 March 1984
- 2025-06 in the title field — brings up the records of things published during June 2025
- [HSP] in the title field — brings up the records of things published by the Harvard Sussex Program
- BWC-MSP-2024 in the title field — brings up the records of official documents from the 2024 BWC Meeting of States Parties
- Robinson in the author field (and if you can’t guess what that will return please log out now!)
- cwc.neg in the keywords field — brings up items tagged as relevant to the CWC negotiations
- uk.bwc.neg in the keywords field — brings up records of UK contributions to the BWC negotiations
- za.bwc in the keywords field — brings up records of interactions between South Africa and the BWC
- shib-D6.57.1 in the keywords field — brings up items from SHIB fileheading D6.57.1 [elimination of Syrian CW]
- shib-H2.2 in the keywords field — brings up items from SHIB fileheading H2.2 [papers from the CD and predecessors]
Returns come from the catalogue entries from the collections put together by Julian Perry Robinson and by Richard Guthrie. Not all holdings are yet catalogued in an accessible form and this work is ongoing, especially for the Robinson collection. As an experiment, a few documents have had weblinks added to the original sources to assess what the usefulness and resource implications might be; this is particularly for documents dated in June 2025, i.e., starting 2025-06.
Two key points worth noting: (1) the inclusion of any document or other resource in this dataset does not imply any endorsement, simply a recognition that it has some relevance to the debates on particular issues but this might include inadvertent or deliberate inaccurate information; (2) while it would be interesting to generate a search system that produced direct links to copies of documents that are not freely available online, it is not possible to reproduce documents that are under copyright without a clear “fair-use” justification.
Last updated (RG) 30 January 2026