The formal beginning of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters is marked by a modest lack of information, or at least explanation. The Records show that the Academy was formally organized 3 January 1908, in Provo; a second (and unexplained) organizational meeting was held 22 February in Salt Lake and "The First Annual Meeting was convened in the Packard Library on 3 April 1908. Although the Academy's journal continues to print the April 3rd date for its birth, typed meeting minutes in the Records clearly document the two earlier organizational efforts.

Even though not all were present (nor, for that matter, actively involved) fifty-two scholars, teachers, and scientists are considered by Academy historians to have been founders and/or charter members. During the following seventy years, Academy membership has increased more than ten-fold.

From this beginning, the Utah Academy has demonstrated growth and development in size of membership, sphere of influence, and scope of interests; much of this revealed in the extant Records.

Through the years the affairs of the Academy have been guided by its Council, a body consisting of the principal officers and (variously) three or more non-officer members. The Academy Council meets irregularly at the President's call and nearly always during or just prior to each semi-annual meeting. A committee structure works through study and recommendations to assist the Council in arriving at decisions; this sub-structure is quite similar to other scholarly and professional organizations that cannot afford paid professional staff.

The organization and structure of the Academy has undergone a number of changes since its inception in 1908; some of these include: 1) expansion and refinement of the divisional structure, 2) incorporation, and 3) publications changes.

In 1934, after months of study and consideration, the Academy Council formally expanded the organization to four divisions including Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Arts and Letters; the Council also changed the name of the Academy to reflect its new scope of interests, and the organization assumed the name it has carried to date. Simultaneously, the Council provided for specialization within each division by opening the possibility of multi-sectioned meetings of the several disciplines within each division.

In 1955 the Academy sponsored the creation of a Junior Academy of Sciences; this group was nurtured and encouraged (chiefly through student papers, public demonstrations, and Junior Science Fairs) until in 1957 the parent body's constitution was amended to permit the elevation of the Junior Academy to full divisional status within the Academy. Some attention and support has also been given by the Academy to the arts and letters in Utah's secondary schools.

After study and discussion that continued for many months (and with increasing intensity), the Academy Council voted, in April 1969, to approve in principle the separation of Arts and Letters into two divisions; this action was ratified by the full membership the following September. Thus, the Academy assumed the organizational structure it exhibits at this writing: five multi-sectioned divisions and the Junior Academy--treated organizationally as a division.

The finances of the Academy have grown increasingly complex. This circumstance, together with the then increasing availability of Federal (and other) grant monies pointed to the advisability of incorporation. The Council believed, furthermore, that incorporating as a non-profit organization might enhance the Academy's investment program. The membership approved incorporation in 1960.

Of the several periodic and intermittent publications of the Academy, the longest running has been what is now titled . This journal carried the title from ca. 1922 until 1977 when was adopted. And prior to 1922 the Academy's journal was called .

The genesis and development of the Utah Academy has thus been marked by the Academy's own peculiar form of mitosis, i.e., division, expansion, and re-identification of itself. These few paragraphs are not intended to be considered the definitive chronology of the Academy; this brief sketch is but an attempt to provide the Records user with some sense of how the Academy has arrived at its present form.

Selected Projects

The development of a functioning structure for the Academy may be discerned with relative ease; what is more complex is the manner in which the membership chooses to manifest its joint and several interests or to achieve its stated goals. The purpose, or objectives, of the Academy may be stated with almost deceptive simplicity: To promote research and creative endeavor in the science, arts, and letters.

To make the obvious point, the Utah Academy can and does do this by its semi-annual meetings and through . The business of the Academy is conducted, motions discussed, positions considered and assumed, papers read and discussed, and so forth. But then most academic societies perform in this manner. The Utah Academy has, moreover, entered into other involvements as it sought to fulfill the goals enunciated in 1908; some of these involvements and projects are touched upon below.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Utah Academy has been associated almost from the beginning of the Academy. The Utah organization affiliated early in its existence with the Pacific Division of the AAAS; and in 1922 the Academy (and the University of Utah) hosted the Pacific Division's annual meeting. Similar cooperative associations between these two groups occurred for several decades with varying degrees of active involvement by the Academy.

1940 saw the Academy begin to recognize publicly and honorifically outstanding leadership and achievement in the sciences; recognition in the arts and letters was to come later. Presently the Academy presents a Distinguished Service Award both in the sciences and in arts and letter.

One of the first important efforts by the Academy to exert its influence outside academia occurred in 1945 when a committee of members drafted legislation intended to help solve some urgent problems of natural resource conservation. For a variety of reasons these efforts were unsuccessful; but the Academy was perceptibly broadening in scope of interests and influence.

The creation of the Junior Academy was touched on earlier, but this effort to heighten the awareness of scientific studies in the secondary schools merits a second mention. Fortuitously, the elevation of the junior Academy to divisional status within the Utah Academy was followed, in 1960, by the inception of a Visiting Scientist Program. This program provided National Science Foundation funds to pay for visits by Academy scientists to high schools throughout the state to encourage further the study of the sciences. Meritorious Teaching Awards were begun in 1965.

The Academy continued to seek ways and methods of honoring (and thereby stimulating) meritorious work and service, and in 1967 announced the creation of the Willard Gardner Prize in the natural sciences. The Charles and Annaley Naegley Redd family also endowed a commemorative prize. Both are endowments in perpetuity. And finally, the Redd family created the Academy Award (limited to authors published in the ).

Correspondence extant in the Records leads reasonably to the conclusion that Academy members called to serve on nominating and/or selection committees for these awards have been quite earnest and serious in their deliberations. These are representative of the awards, honors, and other tangible symbols of recognition developed by the Academy through the years. There are others, and these described in more detail in Behle's monograph (see Bibliography).

Present Methodology

The Records of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters (ca. 1908-1977) arrived at the Utah State Historical Society Library in several stages beginning in 1960 and is ongoing. The Records occupied (at the time this Register was being prepared) some twenty-eight loosely and irregularly packed document cases. These Records included quantities of correspondence, news clippings, internal routing or cover memorandum forms, printed programs, typed and reproduced copies of meeting announcements, agenda, and minutes; there were also large quantities of multi-copy forms used for membership applications, requests and authorizations for payment of Academy expenses, copies of form and circular letters sent to officers of the Academy's Council and to others. Reams of many of these kinds of materials had been stored for decades in the Records of the Academy.

When processing of the Academy Records began, the materials revealed several characteristics worth describing. First, the materials were in excellent condition--including those that date from 1908. Foxing is nonexistent; no torn or otherwise fragmented portions of documents were to be found. Through the years many officers of the Academy have shown prudence in the care and circulation of the organization's papers.

Second, many parts of the collection reveal serious efforts to order and systematize various kinds of documents, e.g. checks, membership rolls, correspondence on certain subjects and/or projects, etc. Next, after the first three decades of the Academy's life, the character of the extant materials changes markedly. Correspondence becomes the principal vehicle in the conduct of the Academy's affairs from approximately 1940 to date, whereas the pre-WW II years show principally neatly typed minutes of Council meetings and programs of the larger membership meetings including the titles of papers read.

Finally, the least obvious but possibly most important characteristic revealed in the initial review of the Academy Records is that they tend to reflect the personal working habits of the people who have served as President or Secretary-Treasurer. This characteristic extends equally to the volume and to the type of materials retained by past Academy officers.

The initial step in preparing the Academy (and a Register for use as a finding aid) was to review the extant materials for the purpose of determining which duplicate materials could be discarded, which must be saved and inventoried, and the most useful system of arranging the Records for scholarly use. The criteria for retention of materials included potential contribution to an understanding of the decision-making process within the Academy and whether or not the materials related significantly to events in the Academy's history.

Using such guides, all correspondence was retained as were all identified fiscal records and statements that included information and data for meaningful periods (e.g., year-end financial statements, auditors' reports, budgets, grant project proposals, etc.). Further, copies of programs for the Academy's semi-annual meetings were retained as well as both the agenda and the typed minutes of the meetings of the Academy Council. In every instance where duplicate copies of documents and correspondence were discovered, only one of each was retained.

The character of the Academy's Records, the nature of the growth and development of the Academy, and the potential uses of the materials dictated a systematic, uniform, and unexceptioned arrangement for the Records. Although some of the Academy's papers had been casually or informally grouped by project or activity prior to their delivery to the History Library, thin grouping process had apparently been attempted by more than one person at different times; and this did not allow for uniform arrangement of the materials. Consequently, the entire body of materials was rearranged into the strictest possible chronology.

Materials in the Records that are undated have been placed adjacent to dated or otherwise identifiable materials whose context makes such adjacency reasonable. Items that are more difficult to place in chronologic context have been placed in the back of the folder containing materials most likely to relate to the undated document.

The most basic type of document found in the Academy's Records is correspondence. Letters, memos, telegrams, etc., are arranged by the creation date shown by the writer of the document. Interleaved chronologically with the voluminous correspondence are the other materials, most commonly agenda for the minutes of meetings, copies of programs for the semi-annual meetings, and occasionally copies of papers read, abstracts, and similar materials are also included. But to repeat: The tightest possible chronology is the present system of arrangement for the Records of the Utah Academy.

One further point should be made. In several instances some of the materials of the Academy arrived in a bound or other permanent form. Rather than disassemble these volumes it seemed more reasonable to leave them intact and place them in document cases in the chronologic sequence at the point where the earliest document would have been placed had it not been bound.

The Records of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters consist, at this writing, of twenty-eight document cases housing approximately 90 acid-free folders; these folders and cases contain the extant correspondence and other materials of the Academy ranging in age from 1908 to 1977. Materials of the 1970's occurs in much smaller quantity than is the case for earlier decades. The materials are arranged chronologically by document cases, by folder within document cases, and chronologically within each folder. As the leadership of the Academy so determines, additional materials will be added to the Records.