archiving (was Re: Nicolet 660)

Stanford Library special collections have the Ampex and Apple archives, which contain manuals. The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota as well as the institution I work for (The Computer History Museum) have extensive manual collections. Test equipment is out of the scope of CBI or CHM's collecting scope, though. But seems to be getting coverage from private collectors and some companies (like Agilent). If there were significant numbers of people from universities at this conference, you should have noticed that they have problems enough trying to fund the archiving of the contents that their own institutions, without actively collecting on the outside. This reminds me of a friend from years ago that was a fan of steam traction engines. No "official" institution collected documentation on them, but there were preservation organizations that kept their own archives. The problem, of course, is if the society is disbanded without a long-term recipient for the material collected.