STHC-L: The Science, Technology and Health Care Archives Forum

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science/technology archives 

     I want to thank everyone who responded to my query about science and 
     technology archives.  I found the comments very informative and 
     helpful.  There were some happy notes in the replies, like the 
     creation of an engineering and technology collecting initiative at 
     North Carolina State University or Oxford's Contemporary Scientific 
     Archives Centre.  But most of the archivists and historians who 
     replied seemed to feel that the preservation of these resources is a 
     serious problem.
     
     As I read through the e-mail, I noticed three general problems:
     
     1.  Convincing public and private institutions about the value of 
     saving their records for historical research.
     
     2.  Finding money to pay for the housing and care of archival 
     collections.
     
     3.  For researchers, the difficulty of finding accurate, up-to-date 
     information about the location and availability of archives relevant 
     to their research needs.
     
     I would like to make a few comments about these problems (and invite 
     further discussion).
     
     In convincing public and private institutions to save their records, 
     it might help if they had a better understanding of how historians 
     could use them in their work.  The fact that the SAA in Orlando has 
     invited a couple of researchers to talk about their work is 
     encouraging, but I think more could be done along these lines.  I 
     don't think historians of science and technology should assume that 
     everyone else will automatically recognize or appreciate the value of 
     what they do.  This requires advocacy and education.
     
     The lack of funds is chronic problem, not just in archival management, 
     but in all areas of historic preservation.  As funding shrinks, we 
     have to become more creative in finding the money to get our work 
     done.  Maybe we should think about cooperative or partnership 
     initiatives to share scarce dollars.  As I write, the First Lady is 
     ending a four-day "Save America's Treasures" tour, part of the 
     Administration's Millenium Project.  A major emphasis of this program 
     is public/private partnerships to stimulate needed preservation work.  
     Why couldn't we do the same thing for archival materials?
     
     With regard to problem three, the lack of current info about archives, 
     maybe the organizations interested in these issues, such as the SAA, 
     the Society for the History of Technology and the History of Science 
     Society could start working together to generate new resource guides, 
     either in electronic or print form.  Some people mentioned that the 
     SAA and SHOT had addressed these problems in the past.  I wonder if 
     any thing concrete has resulted from these discussions and I wonder 
     what would happen if the groups dealt with these issues across 
     professional boundaries.
     
     I would be interested in hearing what others think about these ideas.
     
     This last item is for Steve Lubar, of the Smithsonian, who asked about 
     the location of patent law firm records:  The Edison NHS Archives has 
     a fairly complete set of records of the Edison Company Legal Dept.  
     The bulk of this material covers the 1900-1920 period, mostly dealing 
     with phonograph, motion pictures and battery litigation.  We have a 
     lot of correspondence between Edison, his in-house attorneys and 
     outside law firms dealing with patent applications and litigation 
     strategies.  You may not be interested in the technologies involved, 
     but I think you would find it a rich resource.
     
     Leonard DeGraaf
     National Park Service
     Edison National Historic Site
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