Collaboration and Future Projects

Creating Information Scholars and journalists working on the history of Silicon Valley are mainly concerned with writing articles and books. But their work also creates primary material, in the form of interviews, notes of events, and collections of documents-- business plans, pitches to investors, the menu of a catered dinner at Il Fornaio-- that are normally destroyed. Unlike their colleagues who work exclusively in the archives, contemporary historians do not just consume primary material in the course of doing their research; they create it. This primary material often contains unique and invaluable information. Eyewitness accounts of events are often different from retrospective recollections; ethnographic notes capture details that are lost in company histories; and interviewees talk about things that never get written down. As useful as these materials could be to one's contemporaries, they can be even more valuable to future writers. But these documents and data almost always remains private, rarely become public, and often are lost. Others cannot benefit from them, and their creators lose a chance to gain public credit for this work. The Virtue of Collaboration This material has been lost because technical constraints have made it difficult to publicize created primary material, and few archives have taken an interest in collecting and preserving this material. Sharing this content will strengthen the enterprise of contemporary history, giving all its practitioners access to useful writer-generated content. Preserving it will guarantee that future generations of scholars will have primary material to which they can apply new tools, and the additional historical perspective that comes from distance. At the same time, this material can be shared in ways that don't challenge existing academic career structures. The Possibilities Electronic publishing makes it easier to collect and store this content, to index and retrieve it, and to link it to other primary resources. The Internet makes it possible to distribute it at extremely low cost, even to have it available as background for future scholarly work. (Indeed, when hyperlinks into the archive replace footnotes, readers of a scholarly article who want to track down a citation can simply click on a link to get to the original-- regardless of whether the original is a paper, an interview, a video, or an Outlook entry. From there, readers can go to other primary documents, even to other articles offering competing views of the same event.) The Proposal SiliconBase could develop an organizational infrastructure to gather primary materials created by researchers and writers on Silicon Valley; convert them into electronic format; and make them available to students, colleagues, and most important, future scholars. This effort would not, I think, require a substantial permanent investment of manpower or time, though it will demand steady attention and a willingness on my part to develop and pursue opportunities. I envision four major efforts in this area, all defined by a high degree of collaborative activity focused on capturing and preserving content developed in the course of pursuing research projects. The first two involve capturing material created by independent writers; the other two bring SiliconBase into the research process. We may not be able to pursue all four at once, or may choose to keep one or two of them small-scale, until the value of the concept is proven. Acquisition of Existing Material The first is a campaign to acquire materials from writers who have produced notable works on Silicon Valley. In all cases, many details still need to be worked out, but the initial feedback suggests that this is an effort worth pursuing. If it works, this would provide a relatively inexpensive way of acquiring new, unique content, that readers may have had a glimpse of but have never seen in its entirety. We could jump-start this process by bringing into a single place the seven interviews from Special Collections that are currently online (Douglas Engelbart, Bruce Deal, Federico Faggin, Lester Hogan, Marcian Huff, Regis McKenna, and Gordon Moore), and adding selected interviews from the Rostky collection, and with officials from Varian Associates. SUP-SiliconBase Series The second is a proposed collaboration with the Stanford University Press to develop a new series on Silicon Valley that would combine print publication of monographs with electronic publication of primary materials created and used in the writing of those monographs. Rather than replicate other experiments in university press electronic publishing (which essentially treat the Internet as a mechanism for personal and desktop publishing), this project would create printed and electronic publications that are complement rather than compete with each other, assure the preservation of primary material that otherwise would be lost, allow scholars to enjoy the professional benefits both of traditional print publishing and participation in an innovative online program. Open Forum The third would make the Forum available to outside researchers for their own work. Under this proposed arrangement, other people doing research on Silicon Valley-- undergraduates, graduate students, academics, and journalists-- could propose new Forum subjects, and take responsibility for developing and managing their projects. SiliconBase would own the resulting content, allowing us to preserve this material while expanding our archive at low cost. Oral History Finally, an oral history project would bring together outside experts with our staff, to record interviews with major figures in Silicon Valley and the history of recent technology. Again, while outside researchers would be heavily involved in planning and conducting interviews, but SiliconBase would be the final repository of the resulting video and audiotapes, documents, etc..

In 1793, a young professor begins researching a book on the forging of the Constitution. He starts correspondences with members of the Constitutional Convention, politicians in Revolutionary France, and former colonial administrators in Britain. In his office are Alexander Hamilton's and George Washington's diary entries from 1787, the correspondence of the Adams family, and minutes of the convention, all transcribed from the originals. He's even collected the recollections of servants and secretaries who worked in Independence Hall a few years earlier. After several years, his house is crowded with material. Thousands of letters from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other members of the convention spill out from his desk, overflow the cabinets, are cleared off the dining room table by the maid. Everyone is keen to talk. From the Continent, Robspierre, Edmund Burke, and others weigh in with their views of the Constitution's significance and success, recall what they heard about the deliberations, and throw in some juicy tidbits about Benjamin Franklin. The book is a solid, thoughtful piece of work, though the title, "Sweating the Details: Making the American Constitution in the Summer of 1787" raises a collective groan. Of course, only a fraction of the material our author has collected is cited directly; but to the eternal frustration of authors, books are like that. Great material always goes unused, as a project gets more tightly defined, or as deadlines loom. Life always seems to short to use all the material you collect. Two hundred years later, which will be more valuable to historians: the book, or the research itself?