We are posting short blurbs on www.facebook.com/babbageinstitute profiling some of our newer and/or interesting collections. Sometimes, the collection's formal title (visible at www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/archmss.html) does not adequately describe the collection's content. We hope these FB postings, continuing now through August (each Tuesday morning), might help get the word out.

"American National Standards Institute. X3H2 records" is pretty cryptic . . . its 11 boxes come direct from the committee's secretary (1978--) documenting the NDL (network database language) and SQL (structured query language) standards. This is how relational databases percolated from IBM (which had donated SEQUEL) out into the wider world. "X3H3 records" hardly captures that. See <purl.umn.edu/40837>
"Ada Programming Language Materials, 1981-1990" is not quite so cryptic. Three boxes contain product literature, project reports, technical reports, working papers, newsletters; and user group information. Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago with the bicentennial coming up 10 December 2015. See <purl.umn.edu/41474>
"SC34 committee records" is also somewhat cryptic . . . this collection documents SGML, the ur-standard from which HTML, XML, and much else derives. Ten boxes document development of SGML and current XML tools . . . early drafts of SGML administrative materials, documentation, working group papers, and standards for computer languages. See <purl.umn.edu/42431>

Please contact CBI's archivist-curator Arvid Nelsen <nels0307@UMN.EDU> for more information about using these or other CBI collections. CBI's collections are open to the public, without charge. We have a modest travel grant program with a deadline each January. Five researchers are supported this year <http://www.cbi.umn.edu/research/ntravelfund.html>.