Organizer, chair, and panelist:  Darwin H. Stapleton, Rockefeller Archive Center

Panelists:

Lynn Catanese, Curator, Manuscripts and Archives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE

Ginny Kilander, Reference Archivist, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Cheyenne, WY

Martin L. Levitt, Librarian, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA

Thomas Rosko, Head, MIT Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, MA

Jeffrey R. Yost, Associate Director, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

This panel will bring together representatives of several major archival and manuscript American repositories that have important holdings in the history of technology.  The repositories hold archival materials dating from the 18th through the 20th centuries, and represent a spectrum of subject areas, including engineering, industry, laboratory research, and interfaces with science and medicine.  Most of the collections document American topics, but half of the institutions represented on the panel also have significant collections bearing on of non-American topics.

Although the panelists will not be interpreting history, their presentations nonetheless will engage two of the themes of the 50th anniversary conference.  Certainly the panelists will speak to historiographic issues in that they will suggest how research into specific collections could bear on historians’ understanding of particular historical events and currents. And, given the repositories represented by the panelists, they certainly will address the changing context of the history of technology, particularly information technology and the development of biotechnology.

Each panelist will speak for 10-15 minutes, describing significant collections that are new or underutilized, and will use PowerPoint to illustrate the nature of the documents in the collections, as well as to introduce researchers to the particular repository. Half of the repositories (APS, Hagley, and MIT) potentially will be well-known to the audience for their resources; the valuable resources of the other half are probably less-recognized.  But it is unlikely that the audience will know of the newest acquisitions or the untapped veins of gold at any of the repositories: the goal of each of the speakers thus will be to draw attention to archival and manuscript collections of substantial historical significance that either are new or that, in the view of the panelist, have been underutilized by scholars, so the presentations by each panelist should be revelatory.

For example, the Rockefeller Archive Center has in recent years opened up the archives of the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC, 1947-1985), a global corporation founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller to promote new technologies, as business propositions, in the developing world.  An astonishing array of enterprises in food production and distribution, housing and general construction, and manufacturing were created or invested in by IBEC; and although its focus was in Latin America, it also had substantial initiatives in the United States, Puerto Rico, Italy, and Iran.  The reports, correspondence, photographs and other documents in the IBEC archives are unique windows on industrialization and innovation over four decades, and relate to larger themes of globalization, technological change and transfer, and socio-cultural influences on technology. Although a few researchers have examined elements of this collection, no one has yet examined it from the perspective of the history of technology.

This panel is intended to draw attention to similar research resources of high value, and to stimulate new scholarship.  The presentations should be of particular interest to graduate students, and to graduate student advisors, but should also be of interest to individuals who are not familiar with archives that have strong traditions of promoting scholarly research in the history of technology.