CEOHP’s Archival Partner: The Charles Babbage Institute

As an archives and research center dedicated to preserving the history of information technology and promoting and conducting research in the field, the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) is an important partner in the future of the Computing Educators Oral History Project. This partnership will ensure that the materials from all CEOHP interviews will be archived and cared for alongside the many other materials indexed and stored at this world-class archival facility.

CEOHP and CBI personnel reached an informal agreement for this partnership in November 2010. Over the coming months, please watch as the CEOHP web portal undergoes additional transformations during the process of transferring responsibility for the CEOHP materials to CBI. In addition to the physical and electronic artifacts, the process of transfer includes cataloging everything in the collection and creating a finding index. This finding index will the be incorporated into the interview overview pages as another mechanism for supporting various users who visit the CEOHP site. On the CBI side, all materials from the CEOHP project will further enrich their ever-expanding collection.

Once catalogued at the Charles Babbage institute, interviews from CEOHP will be accessible to all users via the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy and the University Media Archive. Transcripts of audio files, as well as biographical information on interview subjects, will be accessed through the Digital Conservancy’s Charles Babbage Collection materials; media, including interview audiotape and video clips and files will be available through the Media Archive. Users will be funneled to the materials they wish to see and use through metadata in each record on both platforms. CEOHP materials will be discoverable via Google.

Primary support for CBI is provided by the University of Minnesota, through the College of Science & Engineering and the University of Minnesota Libraries. Additional support is provided by corporate donors and individuals through the Friends of CBI.