Hi Christine,

The Charles Babbage Institute Archives might have some materials of interest. The CBI Curator and Archivist is Amanda Wick, cc'd here. We have over 150,000 photographs. A few thousand are available on UMedia (see link below). As the disclaimer states, in some cases we do not necessarily have copyright on images and that is the user's responsibility. Our two large corporate collections of Burroughs and Control Data, I would think in most instances, the images could be used, as the companies likely held copyright and they transferred these large collections to us. In other collections it is less certain, the government ones are generally in the public domain. We also have some video and film sources that might be of interest to you. I would also recommend checking with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, The Smithsonian NMAH & NASM, and the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University Libraries.

CBI Archives (about the collections and link to University Libraries search tool to search the collections) Browse the CBIA Collection Guides | CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE | College of Science and Engineering

UMedia CBI digitized photographs/images UMedia cbi images

Best, Jeff

* * * * * *

Jeffrey Yost, Ph.D.

Director, Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information & Culture

Research Professor, University of Minnesota

Just Code: Power, Inequality and the Political Economy of IT (Johns Hopkins U. Press out in Nov. 2025 co-edited w/ Gerardo Con Diaz)

Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press)

Studies in Computing and Culture book series, Johns Hopkins U. Press Co-Editor (w/ Con Diaz)

PI, NSF-funded CBI project "Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy."

Blockchain & Society (crit. inq. essays & resources) (Founder/Leader)

Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture Co-Editor-in-Chief (w/ Amanda Wick)

On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 2:19 PM christine mitchell via Members <members@lists.sigcis.org> wrote:

Hi SIGCIS members,

Long-time member, first time poster! I'm hoping to connect with librarians, archivists and/or collectors regarding public domain and low- or no-cost visual materials (clips/images) for a kids educational TV show I'm writing and producing.

It's a magazine-style show for kids 8-12 for TVO (TV Ontario, Canada's public broadcaster). Each episode delves into some aspect of the digital technologies kids use every day – from data centers to undersea cables, to recommendation engines, genAI, computer vision, e-waste, etc. In each episode, kid hosts meet an expert to explore how these technologies function in a fun, accessible way. The goal is to encourage kids to get inquisitive about their digital tech and use it in informed ways.

Several episodes will have a brief "Tech Tangent" segment covering a cool story from computer history. One on ELIZA, one on floppy disk storage and the "Save" icon. We're still in a pre-production phase, so other topics remain TBA.

Our budget is limited and I anticipate that stock image libraries we have access to may not have sufficient or suitable imagery for the computer history segments.

If anyone can point me to contacts or resources that would be helpful to the project, I'd be grateful for all ideas and replies – feel free to contact me off-list.

Thanks so much!
Christine

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