Curation Committee

The IT History Society maintains a public catalog of tens of thousands of hardware, software, and company records. We do not hold physical collections. Our records describe things and point to the libraries, museums, archives, and websites where the deeper material lives, much as a card catalog points readers to the shelves.

The Curation Committee decides what belongs in the catalog. In 2027 it leads our effort to make the catalog comprehensive across every category, working with co-curators who bring niche expertise.

What the committee does

• Leads the work of making the catalog comprehensive across every branch of our taxonomy.
• Identifies index sites and collections on the web whose data can be brought into the catalog, and invites their authors to join us as co-curators.
• Recruits and supports co-curators, who will each look after a part of the catalog they know well.
• Oversees review of what members submit to the catalog, including the member contributions that will appear alongside curated records.
• Decides which companies to prioritize for full profiles.
• Sets the standards for inclusion: what counts as information technology, what is significant enough to record, and when something becomes history. Our working definition is that history begins twenty years ago, and the committee may refine it.
• Maintains the taxonomy that organizes the catalog.
• Maintains our Resources directory, an index of other organizations, archives, and collections devoted to the history of information technology.
• Builds out popular topic collections, such as Video Games and Mobile Phones.
• Works with corporate archivists to improve the completeness and accuracy of company histories.