Charles Babbage Institute News and Information

Herein the second installment of that riveting series, A Day in the Life of an Archivist. Today I spent some time working on creating what we in the biz call "vertical files" (any archivists out there know the origin of this term?). Basically, a vertical files are reference files - materials that aren't actually archival collections, but can still be useful to researchers. Vertical files might contain photocopied newspaper articles, pamphlets, or other reference material on a certain topic. I am lucky because former CBI employees kept extensive files on computing companies, individuals, and other subject areas. None of the files have, up till now, been officially accessible to researchers, but they could be a useful starting place for many research topics and so I've been moving things around, getting our new vertical files ready to be available.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next Tuesday through Friday (June 24-27), CBI will be closed to researchers, as both Arvid and I will be in Los Angeles at the RBMS preconference. I will be checking email periodically, so if you have any questions, you can get in touch that way.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Decided this morning to try something new with the blog. Along with announcements and other information, I will hereby be presenting a series called from now on, very creatively, "A Day in the Life of an Archivist." This is on the off chance that you are interested in what actually goes on behind the scenes at an archives, and because I've heard that one of the code-word professions for CIA operatives is "archivist" because no one knows what it actually means.

Feedback is most welcome.

June 13 (Friday the 13th): We recently got these two donations that I mentioned yesterday, and so this morning I've been going through one of them, seeing what's included and reboxing it for later processing. I'm also doing some preliminary light preservation work, such as dismantling a scrapbook and putting its contents in an acid-free folder. (In case you're interested, I do this because many times, it's not the album itself that has research value, it's the contents, and a folder is much better for preserving the contents than plasticky, sticky pages.)

We have three research appointments for today, and so I'll be doing some work with researchers this afternoon.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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!

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy New Year to all. Now that we're in the beginning of the new year, I thought I'd devote this entry to a watershed event in CBI's past. I was going through old CBI newsletters recently, and came across this article from the Winter 1995 issue: "CBI on the Web!" Naturally, the headline intrigued me, so I spent a few minutes reading the article through. It details the first-ever CBI web site, but the most fascinating parts - at least for computing historians - are the necessity, method, and terminology used to describe the CBI site. Some quotes:

"One advantage of the Web over the Internet Gopher is its ability to highlight certain phrases that, when selected, refer to other documents, images or Internet sites."

"Because of the amount of time they add to calling and viewing a hypertext document, CBI has been conservative in its use of images on the Web."

"CBI established its Web in December 1994...Since that time CBI's archival staff has produced a broad range of hypertext documents."

CBI's current and past newsletters are all available on our web site, and, as you can see, they're worth perusing not just for institutional history but for the history of computing in general.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone planning a research visit should be aware that December 24 and 25 and January 1 are university holidays and that we will be closed. Also, Andersen Library will be closed to the public on December 31.

Finally, our extended Thursday hours will be on hiatus during the semester break, but will resume starting in late January.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CBI's semiannual newsletter is now available for Fall 2007! Please check it out at http://www.cbi.umn.edu/newsletter.html.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"IM an Archivist," our chat service, will be out of commission much of the day today, because Arvid and I will both be attending the Control Data Corporation's anniversary celebration. However, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me!

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to the Charles Babbage Institute's news and information blog. My name is Stephanie Horowitz and I am CBI's assistant archivist. Other people who work here and who may contribute to the blog include Arvid Nelsen, the CBI archivist; Tom Misa, CBI's director; Jeff Yost, the associate director; Katie Charlet, the secretary; and Sasha Grossman, Jessica Huffman, and Kevin Irving, our student assistants.

The Charles Babbage Institute is an archives and research center at the University of Minnesota, dedicated to preserving the history of information technology and promoting and conducting research in the field.

CBI's blog will contain up-to-date information about new collections, events, and other items that you might find useful. Keep checking back for new posts, and feel free to comment or to email us with any questions or suggestions.

Posted by Stephanie Horowitz at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)