“One of the things that excites me about archives is the warts and all,” said Courtney Chartier, an archivist at Columbia University who has worked on Martin Luther King Jr.’s archive and the papers of Tony Kushner, the playwright. “People are complicated, and that’s something we shouldn’t shy away from.”
The Steve Jobs Archive deviates from the repositories of other famous business leaders who largely left their material to corporate or library archives. About half of Harvard Business School’s 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.
Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc entrusted their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the cornerstone of corporate archives.
Much of that corporate archive material is closed to the public, but some companies, such as the Walt Disney Company, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research.
“We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney archives. “We just vet.”
The new Jobs archive debuted with a minimalist website containing eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive calls Mr. Jobs’s “driving motivations in his own words.” The items, three-quarters of which were already public, can be accessed by clicking through maxims made famous by Mr. Jobs, including “make something wonderful and put it out there” and “pursue different paths.”
The next steps for the archive are shrouded in the kind of mystery associated with the way Mr. Jobs ran Apple. About all that’s been publicly disclosed is that Ms. Powell Jobs hired a documentary filmmaker to gather hundreds of oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues. Where that material will be stored and who will have access to it has not been revealed.
Read the full NYTimes article“One of the things that excites me about archives is the warts and all,” said Courtney Chartier, an archivist at Columbia University who has worked on Martin Luther King Jr.’s archive and the papers of Tony Kushner, the playwright. “People are complicated, and that’s something we shouldn’t shy away from.”
The Steve Jobs Archive deviates from the repositories of other famous business leaders who largely left their material to corporate or library archives. About half of Harvard Business School’s 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.
Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc entrusted their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the cornerstone of corporate archives.
Much of that corporate archive material is closed to the public, but some companies, such as the Walt Disney Company, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research.
“We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney archives. “We just vet.”
The new Jobs archive debuted with a minimalist website containing eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive calls Mr. Jobs’s “driving motivations in his own words.” The items, three-quarters of which were already public, can be accessed by clicking through maxims made famous by Mr. Jobs, including “make something wonderful and put it out there” and “pursue different paths.”
The next steps for the archive are shrouded in the kind of mystery associated with the way Mr. Jobs ran Apple. About all that’s been publicly disclosed is that Ms. Powell Jobs hired a documentary filmmaker to gather hundreds of oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues. Where that material will be stored and who will have access to it has not been revealed.
Read the full NYTimes article for the complete article
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