Spring Newsletter!
The CBI spring newsletter is now available! Check it out for some scintillating articles by Tom and Jeff, as well as news from the director's desk and from the archives.
The CBI spring newsletter is now available! Check it out for some scintillating articles by Tom and Jeff, as well as news from the director's desk and from the archives.
I'd like to put in a plug for the following event in Walter Library on Friday afternoon:
http://sciweb.lib.umn.edu/scimagine/
Lisa Johnston, science and engineering librarian, created a poster for the event containing historic robot images from our Edmund Berkeley collection. I'll be there, too, with some CBI brochures! It should be a good time.
Tom asked me to post the following about an exciting resource that we now have available on our website:
With support from Cisco Systems, CBI digitized the entire run of the journal ConneXions—The Interoperability Report (1987-1996). ConneXions was a central forum for discussing the technical issues and international standards that made the Internet into a seamless, interoperating network. The collection includes many articles by leading members of the Internet community as well as reports on varied managerial, technical, and organizational initiatives. The scanned PDF files are available as individual monthly issues as well as yearly compilations; the site totals 1.5 GB. ConneXions was published by the Interop Company, and this site is with the permission of its successor firm, CMP United Business Media. Ole Jacobsen is presently editor and publisher of The Internet Protocol Journal .
I don't think I've posted anything recently about History | Gender | Computing, the conference hosted by CBI coming up at the end of the month. Please come if you're in the area! Registration is free and it should be a really interesting event. Please email cbi@umn.edu if you have any questions.
See the SHOT blog for a job announcement for an interpretive curator at the Computer History Museum out in California. No PhD necessary, though it looks like they'd prefer a candidate who's published in the computer history field.
The front cover of the newest issue of College and Research Libraries News is a CBI image, from the Calvin Mooers Papers, showing a woman working with Zatocoding. Zatocoding was an information retrieval system developed by Mooers in 1947 that he once stated "antagonized librarians" because of its automation of the field. The issue also contains a brief explanation of the image, written by Arvid, on the table of contents page. Very exciting!
Here's a link to the cover: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crlnews/backissues2008/april08/April.cfm
This past weekend, I attended the 2008 Midwest Junto for the History of Science, a conference geared primarily towards graduate students in the history of science, technology, and medicine. This year's meeting was located in Minneapolis, so it was a good opportunity for me to learn a bit about the field and do a little networking on behalf of CBI. I was impressed with the caliber of many of the graduate student presentations that I saw, particularly those from the University of Minnesota program (no bias) and the University of Oklahoma. The atmosphere was friendly, convivial, and informal; and I became an official Junto member by paying $2 in dues and signing my name in a registration book.
So far, check out the University of Minnesota HSTM blog for a review; more reviews to come, I'm sure. If you're in the Midwest, definitely consider attending next year's Junto at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City.
The Midwest Junto for the History of Science is being hosted this weekend by the University of Minnesota. Although the name does not indicate it, this conference will include presentations on the history of medicine and technology, too. It promises to be an informative couple of days. The conference will begin on Friday, April 4 with a reception at the Bell Museum on campus, and it will end on Sunday afternoon. It also includes a banquet at the beautiful Bakken Library and Museum on Saturday night.
You can email Jole Shackelford at shack001@maroon.tc.umn.edu if you are interested in registering. I hope to see you there!
I just wanted to call your attention to the fact that our very own current Tomash Fellow, Corinna Schlombs, will be giving a talk next Thursday, April 3, at the University of Maryland:
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Speaker: Corinna Schlombs, University of Pennsylvania
“American Corporations in European Computer Markets: IBM and Remington Rand”
About the Speaker: Corinna Schlombs is PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation in the international history of computing investigates the transfer of computing technology and culture between the US and Western European countries from the end of WWII to the late 1960s. The current Tomash Fellow in the History of Information Processing, Schlombs also received an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and pursued part of her doctoral research as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Location:
University of Maryland, Francis Scott Key Hall 2120 (Merrill Room) Refreshments from 4-4.30 p.m.; paper and discussion from 4.30-6 p.m.
Discussion will be based on a pre-circulated paper. Please email David Kirsch, dkirsch[at]umd[dot]edu for a copy.
-from the SHOT blog
We have a new collection processed and ready for use: the I. Bernard Cohen Papers, CBI 182. Emilia, our visiting library student from Illinois, did a great job arranging and describing the collection. Thanks, Emilia!
An announcement courtesy of Jeff:
The 2008-09 Tomash Fellow is Ian Walsh, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Organization Studies, Carroll School of Management, Boston College University. He will be visiting CBI to use a variety of our collections (DECUS, Market Research, Auerbach, etc.) and present his ongoing research in the coming academic year. His dissertation is on the history of organizational afterlife of IT corporations (The degree of identification of former employees with a company after it ceases to exist, and the culture, practices, methods, etc. that live on in new corporate entities/activities.) He is doing cases on the history of two minicomputing firms and their afterlife--Digital Equipment (DEC) and Data General.
His web page is at http://www2.bc.edu/~walshia/ .
CBI awards the Tomash Fellowship annually to a graduate student doing doctoral dissertation research in the history of computing.
Congratulations, Ian!
Come hear Tom and Arvid speak on the topic "Computers Once Were Women - Why Did This Change?" this Friday, March 7, at noon in 120 Andersen! Light refreshments will be served. Here's a brief description:
Through the 1940s, the term "computer" referred to people, often young women, who labored over lengthy hand computations. Throughout the early years of computing history, women played a prominent role, but in recent years, the field has become increasingly male-dominated. The Charles Babbage Institute sheds some light on these changes.
Paul Ceruzzi has recently started a blog for the IT History Society, located at http://ithistory.org/blog . Since the subject matter will be so pertinent to CBI research and collections, I'll be following Ceruzzi's blog closely. Welcome to the blogosphere, Paul!
From the SHOT blog:
Humanities and Technology Review is the journal of the Humanities and Technology Association. HTR is published annually in the fall, and it offers a publication outlet for interdisciplinary articles on a broad range of themes addressing the interface between the humanities and technology.
In the Fall 2008 edition we would like to address the theme of technology and the human condition. We encourage reflection on the impact of technology on the lived experience of peoples throughout the world. The theme can be taken broadly, but here are some ideas:
* Implications of new information technologies for the concept of the world citizen
* Moral responsibility for actions that occur at a distance
* Technology and Developing Countries
* Surveillance Technologies and Privacy Rights
* Technology and the Nature of Labor
* Intelligent Computer Agent “Behaviors” and Accountability
* Spoken Word (hip hop, poetry, free style) and Technology
The 2008 edition will also include a special section: Proceedings, Selected Papers of the 2007 HTA Conference, October 4-6, 2007, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Frederick B. Mills, Editor
Humanities and Technology Review
Department of History and Government
Bowie State University
Email: fmills2003@yahoo.com
CBI is happy to announce that we have scanned and made available, with permission, the first of three of James Cortada's bibliographies of the history of computer applications. The other two will be forthcoming. The volume is available on CBI's Hosted Publications webpage. The file is rather large, so it may take some time to open on your computer. Enjoy!