Stewardship of Digital Heritage
The first comprehensive scholarly study of how museums around the world collect, curate, preserve, and interpret the material and digital legacy of computing — from room-sized mainframes and iconic microcomputers to personal computing.
The first dedicated scholarly monograph examining how museums acquire, preserve, and communicate the heritage of computing — and why it matters for our collective digital future.
Museums of Computing: Stewardship of Digital Heritage addresses a critical gap in both museum studies and the history of technology: the unique challenges that computing artefacts pose for cultural institutions.
This book analyses museums of computing in several pivotal dimensions. As institutions of cultural memory, they continue to play major roles in how we understand our mediated situation; there are many “missing narratives” in media history, and museums have been part of the response to those challenges. Yet media technology advances quickly, and a lot of the discourse about media is hype about present and future perspectives – it can seem as if rapid changes are the only constant, especially in computing. As museums became institutions that associate objects with learning to help us understand the world, they responded to the needs of the cultures that create them - but digital media pose a range of difficult questions in this nexus.
Museums help constitute our collective understanding of the history of computing, and by the same token networked computing has come to complicate the role of museums. Examining the impressive expansion of the museum model also requires analysis of the extent to which the legacy of the museum is challenged by assumptions about obsolescence, forgetting, erasure in digital culture.
Six interlocking themes spanning collections management, digital preservation, institutional politics, and the future of computing heritage.
The policies and practical challenges of deciding which hardware, software, and documentation enters a museum collection — and what is lost forever.
The unique conservation challenges of keeping electromechanical artefacts operational — and the ethical debates around restoration versus authentic decay.
How museums are grappling with the complex status of heritage objects in computing history — from preservation and restoration to replicas and emulators.
Emerging museum practices exhibiting digital artefacts that never existed in physical form to broader audiences online.
Approaches at leading institutions that devote space and resources to the history of computing worldwide.
How institutions and communities can build sustainable stewardship frameworks for computing's ongoing legacy.
Click the colored labels to read more on each chapter.
The following passage is drawn from the Introduction.
"Though the history of computing is still a fairly young field of research, we recognize in many publications the temptation to reduce it to listicls of reference devices or to the names of great inventors. An antiquarian approach that musealizes the legacy of vintage computing devices can be fascinating, but most computer museums are even younger than systematic studies in the history of computing, and placing old devices under protective glass only goes so far in promoting appreciation and understanding of contributions made or opportunities forgotten. Critical history would not indulge in the worship of heroes, for it is very aware of how fragile the current state of knowledge may be, nor is it content with anecdotes about obscure devices and their representation and preservation. The rapid growth in the number of computer museums from the 1990s onwards is not only a function of the profits that resulted from privatizing the backbone of the internet, but also an indicator of the transition from computing as an industry mainly serving corporate and government customers to one addressing individuals and households, from a select user base of professionals to a mass user base, from a scarcity of digital communications to their omnipresence. This development went hand in hand with a commercialization of digital networks, reflecting the rate of change people perceived in their own lifetime and encouraging the preservation of the remains of vanished worlds for future benefit."
Endorsed by leading voices in museum studies, digital preservation, and the history of technology.
“Told through a focus on museums of computing, Krapp gives us an insightful, highly significant and elegantly written critical analysis of the cultures of collecting and memory institutions in the digital era. We get both a history of computers and digital culture, as well as a rigorous and sophisticated exploration of the place of the computer museum (and digital preservation) in supporting, reflecting, reinforcing and reproducing that culture.”
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Selected talks focused on computing heritage and digital preservation.
🌐 Canadian Computing Heritage Network (CCHN) → York University
📍 Defying Defaults in Technology and Culture, UC Riverside → UCHRI
📍 Museo Cabañas → Guadalajara Mexico
📍 ICS Summer Academy → UC Irvine
📍 Cultural Studies Association Annual Conference → CalArts Valencia CA
🌐 Paul Gray Museum → Claremont CA (watch it on 🎥 YouTube)
📍 Museums, Memory, Politics → Newcastle University UK
📍 PAMLA → Palm Springs CA
📍 Yonsei University → Seoul South Korea
📍 Histocrypt 2023 → Science Museum Munich Germany
📍 Zukunftskolleg → Konstanz University Germany
🌐 Week of the Image 2022 → São Leopoldo, Brazil YouTube
For museum studies, library and information science, history of technology, digital humanities, and professional development in the heritage sector.
For seminars, reading groups, or professional development
Online references and visuals
Awesome art photography featuring personal computers by James Ball aka Docubyte. View →
Awesome art photography featuring historical computers, again by James Ball aka Docubyte. View →
A compilation of legacy devices with starring turns in film and television. Watch →
A directory of institutions from around the globe, with links. Explore →
Everything reviewers or conference organizers need — all in one place.