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A Collection Unbound

CHM’s New Digital Portal

It wasn’t infrequent for us to stop while testing a sample record and realize we were looking at something truly cool.

— Stephanie Waslohn, Senior Archivist

As Members of the CHM community, you’ve probably heard something about OpenCHM over the past few years. A complex, multi-year project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the new digital portal is now open to the public.

Created with our partners at Keepthinking, OpenCHM has advanced search features and new storytelling and discovery tools, providing a digital experience that brings the history of the technology revolution to life. Here’s a video we prepared to walk our beta-testers through the portal’s features.

 

So, what exactly does it take to make physical artifacts and historical documents and images available in a searchable, digital format? Below, meet some of the dedicated CHM staff—experts in their respective fields—who put in the careful thought and long hours to make it happen. You can also explore the new search tools and hear what early adapters had to say.

Realizing a Vision

Kirsten Tashev

Chief Curatorial and Exhibitions Officer, CHM

“OpenCHM is the result of years of work—our team migrated nearly 268,000 records to make business plans, software, photos, videos, and over 1,300 oral histories more accessible to the public. The collection has been nearly 5 decades in the making, and CHM is the largest, most comprehensive museum of the digital age in the world. I’ve been at the Museum for over 20 years, and I’ve seen it become a trusted institution with a strong reputation. I’m proud to be a part of it, and proud of what we’ve accomplished with OpenCHM.”

Image: Archival boxes full of historical materials at CHM’s Shustek Center.

Leslie Grothaus

Director, Philanthropic Partnerships, CHM

“The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been a longtime supporter of CHM, always bringing a forward-thinking approach. They were excited about this project because it opens up the collection to more people, letting users not only explore curated stories but also dive into and share what interests them most. They’re also interested to see how other organizations might take inspiration from CHM’s approach to share their own collections in new ways.”

Image: Cofounders of Fairchild Semiconductor from left to right, Julius Blank, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Victor Grinich.

Behind-the-Scenes Perspectives

Massimo Petrozzi, Director, Collection and Digital Initiatives

“I think a complex collection like the one CHM has required the creation of a new platform that is able to provide access to both our extensive historical collection of 3D objects and our rich archival material. Flexibility has been a guiding concept for the entire process because we really wanted to build a platform that will allow us to experiment with new ways to access our collections.”

Check out Massimo’s favorite oral history.

Image: A scanner for digitizing archival materials in CHM’s Shustek Center.

Stephanie Waslohn, Senior Archivist

“Necessity is the mother of invention! In the old online catalog, you could likely find the specific artifact you already knew about, but the basic search struggled with allowing users to discover new things. Browsing as a search entry point is a part of the modern web experience, so increased discoverability was key for OpenCHM. It’s also a great way to viscerally feel the breadth and depth of CHM’s collection, with all sorts of formats and artifact types.

“It wasn’t infrequent for us to stop while testing a sample record and realize we were looking at something truly cool. I felt that way about this record—like, how cool is it to hear the roots of modern music synthesized on a PDP just casually as part of my job?”

Image: Click the link above to learn about this image.

Liz Stanley, Project Manager, Data & Digitization

“On a very basic level, digitization involves carefully preserving physical artifacts by converting them into high-quality digital formats. However, it’s more than just pressing a button, its storytelling that requires metadata, research, and making sense of sometimes obscure materials so that they can be accessed and understood by anyone, anywhere.

“One challenge is decoding the stories hidden in materials that arrive without context. Sometimes there’s no date, no label, no obvious author, just a pile of paper. It takes detective work—and a lot of patience—to piece it all together in a meaningful way.

“What I enjoy the most about OpenCHM is that this project isn’t just about preserving history, it’s about activating it. Through digitization, CHM is creating a living archive where researchers, educators, and the curious public can explore the roots of computing and discover the people and processes behind the machines from any location in the world. Every scan is a piece of a much larger story.”

Image: Colorful arrangement of Philco electronics used by the Ford Motor Company.” Photographer Fred English, from the Fred English Collection, ca. 1969.

David Brock, Director, Curatorial Affairs

“OpenCHM includes new storytelling tools, including a story builder that allows a curator like me to directly draw on digitized materials in the collection to interpret the past for the public. I used the new tool to write about the history of Silicon Valley, a subject I’ve been engaged with for over twenty years.

“I soon realized that there were hundreds of digitized items that could reveal many different histories of Silicon Valley, but to create a story of a reasonable length I would need to limit myself. I began to concentrate on some of the earliest materials, ranging across 3D objects, archival documents, oral histories, moving images, and still photos. My story, “Becoming Silicon Valley, 1945-1960,” covers the period when silicon electronics came to the region that, in 1971, would first be called “Silicon Valley.”

“One of my favorite selections is a typewritten letter (above) from May 1955 between the Caltech chemistry professor turned electronics industrialist Arnold O. Beckman and the future Nobel Prize cowinner for the transistor, William Shockley. It’s an early record of the discussion that would lead to the establishment of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments, Inc., the first silicon electronics lab in Silicon Valley. Learn more about this document, and all my other selections, in the story.”

Guided Exploration

CHM Exhibit Developer Kiera Peacock says, “The online collections catalog search in OpenCHM is quite robust. Think of it as your portal into the thousands of artifacts, oral histories, and archives of CHM.”

Follow along with Kiera below as she searches the catalog. Start your search in a new browser window here.

Simple Search

  1. Begin with a simple search term, in this case “Apple.” I got more than 5,000 results!
  2. That’s too many results. You can add additional search terms without erasing your original search term. I added “iMac” to get a more manageable 37 results.
  3. Looking for something really specific? Try using other filters. I started with the search term “Pong” and selected “See all matches from the keyword” in the pulldown menu). Since I knew I was looking for a physical object (Categories), made in the USA (Location) in 1972 (Year From and Year To), I added these additional filters to find the very first Pong machine. As a bonus, I can see that this artifact is now on view at the Museum!

Browse

  1. Maybe you’re not looking for something specific but want to browse. In this case, I want to look at all the oral histories. I can simply select Oral Histories from the dropdown box.
  2. Similarly, if you wanted to browse a certain category, such as Software, you can do that too.

Find Something Specific

Saw something at the Museum and want to find out more about it? Click the eye icon next to the keyword search to narrow your search to things currently on display—more than 1,000 artifacts!

Think you’ve got it? See if you can find the 5 items below in the OpenCHM online collections catalog.

Catalog Challenge

Altair 8800

This Altair 8800, made in 1975, and now on display at CHM.

Margaret Hamilton Oral History

This oral history interview with Margaret Hamilton.

Zork I

This Zork I video game software published by Infocom, Inc.

UNIVAC Console

This UNIVAC I Supervisory Control Console manufactured by Remington Rand, Inc.

Fei-Fei Li Live Recording

“Fei-Fei Li’s AI Journey” CHM Live Recording (yes, our past events are searchable too!).

The Discovery Wall

OpenCHM’s Discovery Wall features a dynamic display of artifacts chosen by online visitors. Explore some of the most interesting and admired items in the collection through an interactive visual display.

Go to the Discovery Wall.

Early User Experiences

Margaret O’Mara

Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American History, University of Washington and CHM Trustee

“Primary sources can intimidate students, so I’m thrilled about CHM’s new online portal. Its intuitive search and browsing features unlock the Museum’s incredible collections, making historical research more accessible and engaging. I teach a large course on the history of the digital age at UW, with students from history to engineering, and I can’t wait to see how they’ll use this tool to explore the people, companies, and tech that shaped computing history.”

Image: O’Mara discussing her book The Code at CHM in 2019 with tech policy expert Tom Kalil (right) and moderator John Markoff (left).

Elena Agapie

Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine

“After visiting the Computer History Museum, I wanted to share stories about what I learned there and the artifacts I saw with my students.

“The course I teach is called IN4MATX 131, Introduction to Human Computer Interaction. In an in-class activity, the 300 students in the course visited the OpenCHM digital archive and searched for unique artifacts. Among the most popular finds were gaming artifacts like the Nintendo Power Glove and numerous game controllers, Nintendo game boy, and Pacman game cartridge. Students were also drawn to unusual input devices, like the Hot Wheels car mouse, early ergonomic keyboards, and early head mounted displays.”

Image: A variety of historical mice on display at CHM.

We hope you’ll join the researchers, students, journalists, filmmakers, lawyers, hobbyists, and countless others who regularly access the collection. Spend some time exploring OpenCHM! To share your feedback, take this survey.

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