Anyone who has heard about Richard R. Ernst’s meticulous handwriting and his carefully structured lectures at ETH Zurich will hardly be surprised that this sense of order also permeated the management of his personal papers. The former Professor of Physical Chemistry at ETH Zurich made a name for himself primarily through his groundbreaking discoveries in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), which remain the foundations of today’s MRI technology. In 1991, his application of the Fourier transform – allowing molecular structures to be determined far more efficiently – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.