The CDF collaboration, which runs one of the two proton-antiproton collider experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory since the early eighties, has published hundreds of scienticif papers in the course of its 25 years of operation. I believe the number has abundantly surpassed the half-thousand mark, but I am unaware of its exact entity.

Computing the exact number is made complicated by the fact that the publications are scattered in many different magazines: Physical Review Letters, Physics Review, Nuclear Instruments and Methods, etcetera. Plus, there are proceedings to conferences, which in most cases make it to printed form. And finally, the very definition of what is a "CDF publication" is somewhat fuzzy, since in some cases only a part of the collaboration signed the articles -for instance, in detector performance papers.

So the number of scientific publications which constitute what appears the "final product", the ultimate goal of the experiment, is not easily computable -at least, not to the last digit. On the other hand, the CDF experiment maintains a detailed record of all the internal documents submitted by its members to the benefit of their colleagues, for restricted use. This is a normal practice within large collaborations, where the expertise is highly distributed and a written document is often the only way to keep track of work done or the progress of some bit of analysis work or technical improvements in a detector component.

The CDF notes archive is a true gold mine, which has recently passed the mark of 10,000 documents. Most of these documents report progress in a particular data analysis; a few discuss general analysis techniques, or statistical tools and methods; others deal with technical hardware details. The amount of information contained in that library is enormous: those documents tell the full story of the experiment, and its 25 years of life, through the words of the protagonists. A future historian might want to delve into the archive, which is for the most part fully electronic and searchable.

Hundreds of brilliant physicists have contributed to CDF in the last three decades. And I think that, while the final product of their effort are the scientific publications which document the improvement they brought to our understanding of particle physics, their most genuine individual contribution is preserved in those 10,000 internal notes. The notes are not peer-reviewed, they are not constrained by strict formal rules, and they allow the personality of the writers to emerge. The CDF notes are a wonderful legacy.

And, deep down into this post, let me brag about my own contribution to the remarkable CDF notes archive. One's contribution is easy to trace in these documents, which carry only the names of the collaborators who actually did the reported work. My name appears in a total of 72 notes. A drop in the sea! Only one note every 140 has seen my direct contribution. But I am proud of each of them.

I hope that the CDF collaboration will make those ten thousand internal notes public once the experiment ends. It would be a great legacy!