Corporate Archives in Silicon Valley: Building and Surviving Amid Constant Change

An historical understanding of the phenomenon that is Silicon Valley requires the collection and preservation of original records. With the rapid pace of change in the technology industry, how can archivists and their institutions preserve this corporate history? Two archivists address how they were able to found an archives at Cisco Systems and maintain another at Hewlett-Packard. Two common elements emerged: 1) the formation of a licensed limited company (LLC) as the legal structure for the archival repository, and 2) the use of outsourcing to staff both repositories. Outsourcing via a non-profit, in this case the Computer History Museum, or a for-profit archival service provider offers archival and exhibit expertise, scalability, and flexibility, all of which are instrumental for technology companies. With Silicon Valley’s headlong rush toward the future and its extensive use of contractors we believe these case studies will provide a partial mechanism for preserving Silicon Valley history

Who is the Right Fit? Doing Diversity in Translational Research

The growing field of clinical and translational science (CTS) is located at the intersection of academic medicine and industry, sectors that share histories of exclusion and efforts to become more diverse. Indeed, diversity and inclusion of a broad range of experts and backgrounds are believed to be critical to continuous innovation and the growth of the US health industry. But despite an increasing emphasis on diversity in CTS research, and the requirement that federally funded US academic institutions demonstrate their ability to recruit individuals from historically underrepresented groups as identified by gender, race, and ethnicity, interventions aimed at integrating difference fall short of dismantling longstanding structures that normalize gendered orientations towards innovation and scientific progress. This paper investigates how diversity is operationalized in a CTS program in a large US research university. From an intersectional feminist standpoint, we focus on day - to - day practices and the institutional cultures and policies that inform views of innovative translational research and scientific progress. Asking what emerges as the value of efforts to diversify CTS, we found that while almost everyone was working towards increasing diversity, most CTS leaders considered diversity as a balancing factor for team functionality or an enabling factor for innovation based on assumptions about what diverse actors will bring to the table, as opposed to a political concern. Consequently, CTS researchers operationalized the term diversity based on gender stereotypes, while others considered it irrelevant in a meritocracy. We show how these perspectives impacted actors deemed diverse in the medical technology innovation context. As in other fields, more profound mechanisms are necessary to effect institutional change beyond the confines of stereotypin