Fonds consists of 2 accessions.
Accession B1984-0008 is 1 box of speeches and writings, 1938-1979, which are described in Series 3.
The remainder of the fonds is in accession B2004-0017. These records document much of the research, consultant and teaching activities performed by Professor Etkin over his lengthy career from the mid 1940s to the present with the greatest emphasize being on the 1950s to 1980s time period. Series 1, (Correspondence and Committees) gives a good overview of his professional activities and relationships. It also documents his teaching and mentoring of graduate students who often went on to other University or agencies. Series 8 (Teaching) also documents Etkin’s role as a teacher but is limited to lecture notes on his various courses.
Series 2 through 6 document the breadth of Etkin's research and publishing activities. Often there is a cross over among these series where files for a specific topic can be found in several places. This reflects the tangential nature of his research. A research topic, for example, may have begun as a consultant project but ultimately led to further study resulting in a professional paper being presented at a symposium or published in a journal. Etkin often continued to research into areas of interest even after the grant funded research was complete. So while Series 2 (Lectures, Talks and Seminars) and Series 4 (Research Files) represent the bulk of the research he did on his own, most often there are related topics found in either Series 6 (Grants) or Series 7 (Consulting Files). As a general rule, research conducted for a government agency was usually done as part of a granting structure and is documented in Series 6, while research undertaken for industry was done on a consultancy basis and is documented in Series 7. Series 4 (Book Files) only contains documents related to his books on Flight Dynamics. Records relating to research that Etkin undertook toward the improvement and development of a new particle separator have been placed at the end of the fonds in Series 10 (Infrasizer Ltd.).
While Professor Etkin held several minor and two significant administrative posts at the University of Toronto, only a small amount of records exist in this fonds that document these roles. They can be found in Series 8 (University of Toronto).
This fonds will be of great interest to researchers interested in the early development of the Canadian aerospace industry, especially in the early years of the Cold War. The University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies received much of its outside funding from U.S and Canadian government agencies during this period. Work being done by Etkin and other IAS colleagues documents the link between industry and government in the field of aerospace research. Naturally, this fonds would also be of interest to anyone wishing to study the history of IAS and the early teaching and research of aerodynamic engineering in Canada.
