[ih] Archive of internet-history email (and others)

[Craig Partridge]

Speaking as someone who trained as a social historian as an undergraduate
(before I saw the light :-)), one historian's dross is another historian's
great value, so prune carefully.

It is probably worth listing the kinds of things historians these days look
for:

   - Obviously historians care about the evolution of technology.  So
   successive draft specifications (of something notable -- aka that got used)
   are of great interest.
   - Historians also care about personalities.  While we tend to think of
   technical decisions as being objective, they are actually typically a mix
   of objective engineering decisions and the personalities of the team.  So
   material that sheds light on team dynamics and thinking are valuable.

Historians and repositories typically do NOT want the 450th copy of IBM
manuals (or DEC manuals or whatever).  Though I note some stuff is
difficult to find -- so worth doing a web search to see if the manual you
have is available on-line.  If not, it may be useful.

Craig

PS: I'm reminded of a story from my undergraduate days.  A professor told
of doing research in the archives in Florence, Italy a few years before
(this would have been early 1970s).  You needed a letter of reference from
your university to get into the archives and the letter had to state why
your research mattered.  A PhD student from an unnamed university showed up
with a letter, interested in doing research on architectural trends in
medieval Florence, and the head archivist refused to let them in as the
topic was not, in the archivist's view, respectable research!  (Now, of
course, it is a routine topic).

On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 6:49 PM Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Bill's message was very interesting. But I've curtailed it below, to
> comment on one point.
>
> On 09-Mar-25 07:33, Bill Ricker via Internet-history wrote:
> > *1. Planning and Execution*
>
> A few years ago I went through all the office files of a deceased
> colleague, and deposited the material with some level of historical
> interest in three different museums. Currently I'm the guardian of one
> heavy box of files from another deceased colleague that I have to advise
> their family about - there's a good chance that it's partly of museum
> quality too. Having also done archive research myself, I feel entitled to
> make the following statement: both of those colleagues kept too much stuff.
>
> So I would suggest that anyone who has paper archives either prunes them
> vigorously or (perhaps better) makes a *very* detailed list of contents.
> Otherwise, future users of the archives will very likely fail to find the
> important bits.
>
> Of course pruning an archive is a matter of judgment, but an archive of
> paper that's 90% dross is a problem in itself.
>
> (The same problem exists for electronic archives, but at least there we
> can imagine searches being automated in a way that's impossible for paper
> and rather unreliable for scanned and OCR'ed paper.)
>
> Regards
>     Brian Carpenter
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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