As already mentioned in the section entitled ASCR Archives - Past and Present, an abridged summary of the record-groups and collections in these archives has been created with the assistance of a grant from the American IREX agency. This fact is the reason for the supplementation of the text by a survey providing information on American-Czech scholarly contacts. As the term "survey" implies, this is of course just a selection from the large number of documents which form part of almost all the record-groups (incl. personal papers) held at the ASCR Archives. To be specific, mention is only made of record-groups containing either a large quantity of archive material of this nature, or record-groups with material considered especially important from the historical viewpoint by the authors. For example, practically all record-groups of the CSAS institutes contain archive material relating to plans for trips abroad (including the USA) and their evaluations. Typologically, these are identical material (mostly 1950s - 1970s), and so we did not consider it necessary to mention them for individual institutes.
Nor is mention made of travel reports kept in the record-groups of individual institutes. For these, the primary source is the Collection of Travel Reports, which brings together all such documents in one unit. For the USA it contains over 10 containers from 1950s to 1980s. Moreover, most of the personal papers kept at the ASCR Archives contain sources on the history of American-Czech scholarly relations in varying forms and quantities. These mainly involve correspondence with individual American scholars, scholarly institutes, societies, associations, academies, universities and so forth, and relate to articles by American scholars published in Czech periodicals and by Czech scholars published in the USA, on materials from various congresses, conferences and symposia, on membership diplomas awarded to Czech scholars in the USA, photographs of American scholars and the like. Of course they cannot all be detailed here in full. If personal papers of any scientist or scholar only contains individual items, this information is not given at all and if it contains more extensive items, e.g. correspondence and the like, we provide this information at a general level only, and only if it is exceptionally relevant (e.g. correspondence with eminent figures from the history of science, extensive sets of articles or other materials etc) do we give specific details.
The conclusion of this section is made up of more detailed information on several selected institutes and figures, whose record-collections on the subject in question are exceptionally extensive. There are two institutes: MAL and the State Observatory, and nine individuals: J. V. Daneš, I. Málek, J. Heyrovský, B. Němec, K. Novotný, O. Odložilík, J. Opočenský, S. Špaček and O. Wichterle.