Assembled over the course of 15 years of research and teaching, the Thomas S. Mullaney East Asian Information Technology History Collection is one of a kind and will greatly deepen Stanford’s holdings. The collection is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, containing rare machines alongside archival and printed documents.
Source: Stanford Libraries
“I did not realize that I had become a collector until about halfway through the process,” Stanford Professor of History Thomas S. Mullaney recalled. “I began by buying a few items from used bookstores for my research. Others were donated to me by people trying to find a home for their antiques. Only after my collection had grown did it dawn on me how rare and fragile these materials were. They needed a permanent home.”
Mullaney donated more than 2000 items, along with a detailed bibliography and high-resolution scans. Dating from the turn of the twentieth century to the present age of computing, the collection has strong Chinese holdings and additional materials from other East Asian countries. It documents the modern history of Chinese and East Asian telegraph codes, typewriters, printing, mimeographs, word processors, computers, and a host of other information technologies.
“We intend to invest modestly and selectively to build upon the collection by expanding its Japanese holdings and establishing a Korean section,” said Michael A. Keller, vice provost and the Ida M. Green University Librarian at Stanford. “Professor Mullaney will be an advisor to these expansions.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
From the American Library Association: With funding from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, the American Library Association (ALA) has published “Programming with Primary Sources: Women’s Suffrage,”a resource ...
From a PEN America News Release: James Patterson, the best-selling author, has donated $2 million to PEN America to build communications capacity and help the premier writers’ organization speak louder ...
From a Introductory Blog Post by Dylan Ruediger and Danielle Miriam Cooper: Today, Ithaka S+R releases findings from one of the largest in-depth studies of teaching practices across social science ...
From Stateline/Pew: There are more than 600 oral history recordings housed where Lina Ortega is an associate curator for the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma Libraries. Ortega speaks ...
From the University of Louisville: The current and former ownership of one of America’s most respected newspapers has made it possible for a treasure trove of an estimated 3 million ...
Elsevier Appoints Emily Singley to the Newly Created role of Vice President, North American Library Relations Exploring the Potential Role of Citizen Science in the Warning Value Chain for High ...
From the UC Berkeley Library The UC Berkeley Library is full of stories — and not just the ones that line its shelves. The facts you’ll find here are at ...
From The Chicago Tribune: Last week, city and Chicago Public Library officials declared Chicago a sanctuary city for those stories, by establishing “Book Sanctuaries” across the city’s 77 distinct community ...
From Penn State: Penn State University Libraries has expanded its robust scholarly research potential of one of America’s foremost 20th-century writers through the acquisition of the Toby and Betty Bruce ...
From Politico: Far from the trenches in states like Florida and Texas, organizations in deep-blue New York are stepping into the fray by directly lending 25,000 books to non-residents since spring, ...
From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...
From a ULC Release: The Urban Libraries Council’s new member tool — the Business Value Calculator — provides public libraries with a concrete way to measure and evaluate its contributions ...
