Dear Colleagues,

Wanted to share that we at the Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information & Culture (CBI) did a complete redesign of the CBI Website (a major  half year undertaking as we had 8,800 web pages!). CBI Archivist/Curator Amanda Wick and I helped, but the lion's share was done by CBI Admin. Melissa Dargay, who did a tremendous job!  CBI's new website   (Note the old URL has redirects to this, as do core areas such as Interfaces, collections, oral histories, etc). 

In these pandemic times, I wanted to highlight that CBI has considerable material for primary research online.  I was recently asked by a UMN HSTM faculty colleague to teach a graduate seminar session on CBI oral history methods/resources and other history of tech and science digital primary resources at CBI (and beyond). So thought I'd share a few things on our materials available remotely in case it might be helpful to you or your students.
  • Before jumping to the digital resources, I will start with the readily digitizable/scannable. We have over 320 collections of print/manuscript materials--7,000 plus feet.  Given detailed CBI Finding Aids, and the nature of particular collections, some are especially conducive to ascertaining smaller discrete portions where modest sized scanning orders can be placed (scanning is done at relatively low rates, basically at cost, by Univ. Libraries, we are a partnership of HSTM/CSE and UL). Plan well in advance as scanning orders done by limited staff in the library building to maintain safety, please check with Amanda.
A few examples of such materials.... the wide ranging gray literature of the National Bureau of Standards Computer Lit. Collection (NBS collected all reports it could on computing from gov., industry, white papers, etc. for 30 years and NBS/NIST gave them to us) consists of 10,000s of reports on virtually all areas of computing from the 1950 to 1970s, every title is in the FA.  Another example is the Social Issues in Computing Collection of ephemera, pamphlets, booklets, books, and manuscripts on computing and race, gender, labor, GBLTQIA... materials highly conducive to research in the social history and sociology of computing.
  • CBI has some exciting born-digital collections on such topics as Internet history and standards, Seymour Cray/Cray Research, graphics, etc.
  • About 500 oral histories available in full text online, most done by CBI historians on NSF, NEH, DARPA, and Sloan sponsored projects--we have special concentrations of oral histories in some of the core following areas, and are continually adding to our collection (I am currently doing two oral history projects, including one for ACM on HCI): 
    • gender/women''s history of computing/software
    • computer security; computer networking
    • AI, ML 
    • HCI
    • Graphics
    • Time-Sharing
    • CDC, IBM, IT industries
    • scientific computing, etc.
  • We have more than 275 shorter interviews with different categories of users of NSF's cyberinfrastructure FastLane (faculty, staff, program officers, developers designers, NSF top managers), all done by Tom Misa and me. Interviews rich for rhetorical analysis on IT and the history of science or other topics and framings wholly different from what Tom and I used them for in our FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World book.
  • Of CBI's 150,000 plus photographs many thousands of selected photographs have been scanned, especially in Burroughs and Control Data Collections but other people, firms, tech, settings, as well.

Amanda and I are always delighted to advise and assist with our collections and their use.

Also, if you haven't read the Smithsonian's Paul Ceruzzi's recent essay on the infrastructure and materiality of the cloud in Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture, Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture  please check it.  And please consider writing an essay for Interfaces. We have some very exciting material in the works. Please add to it!!!

Best, Jeff
 

"Injustice wears the same harsh face wherever it shows itself."-Ralph Ellison

Jeffrey R. Yost, Ph.D.
Director, Charles Babbage Institute
Research Professor, Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
 
222  21st Avenue South
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
 
612 624 5050 Phone
612 625 8054 Fax