Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System

The new development took place under a National Science Foundation grant headed by Edwin B. Parker, principal investigator.

SPIRES joined forces with the BALLOTS project to create a bibliographic citation retrieval system and quickly evolved into a generalized information retrieval and data base management system that could meet the needs of a large and diverse computing community.

SPIRES became the primary database management system for Stanford University business and student services in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2004, SPIRES was migrated off the mainframe onto Unix platforms by means of a System/360 emulator developed by Dick Guertin.

This project stores bibliographic information about the literature of the field of High Energy Physics and is an example of academic databases and search engines.

The SPIRES engine is less than one-megabyte in size, but performs all the searching, maintenance, and formatting of databases.