Webpage by Eduardo Beira (ebeira@inovatec.pt)

Digital Resources for the Michael Polanyi Papers

After Michael Polanyi’s death in 1976, Polanyi’s papers, now known as the Michael Polanyi Papers (MPP), and a number of books in Polanyi’s personal library eventually were sent to the University of Chicago Library where the papers became one of the Regenstein Library’s many special research collections. The library books eventually went back into the circulating collection, although there is a list the titles now in two boxes of the papers. An archivist prepared the Guide to the Papers of Michael Polanyi Papers (sometimes called the Cash Guide—the name of the archivist), which has now been been revised several times and put online. An early version of the Guide was an issue of Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical 23.1 (1996-97). There are now 60 boxes (approximately 30 linear feet) of archival materials of various sorts in the Chicago collection. In the early nineties, the Michael Polanyi Liberal Philosophical Association (MPLPA), centered in Budapest, purchased available microfilms of archival material and digitized 44 boxes of this collection. This was an early and innovative archival digitization project and it was a component of the broader post-communist program of the MPLPA to make resources on Polanyi’s thought available in central and eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet empire. The 44 boxes of the digital MPP are in fact many thousands of small image files (around 45 thousand since each page is a separate file); in a subsequent project, the MPLPA put together a database which helps users locate and link materials in the MPP.   (Phil Mullins, here)

Guide to the papers of Michael Polanyi (pdf)
John N. Cash, University of Chicago Library (1977, revised 1996)
Tradition and Discovery, The Polanyi Society Journal, vol 23 (1) 4-44 .