The Steve Jobs Archive
Baba Flores
It begins with the Apple Library. In 1981, after Apple had been in business for 5 years, engineers in the Research & Development group decided they needed centralized research materials and services. In effect, they needed a library. So they hired a professional librarian, Monica Ertel, who built what became a world-renowned (among librarians) corporate library known simply as the Apple Library. Its overall goal was to give Apple a competitive advantage by providing information.
In addition, there was an ongoing employee-led grassroots effort to collect historical products to start a museum. In the early 1980s, an ad-hoc committee of Facilities, Records Management and the Apple Library started tracking and gathering small, informal exhibits from around the company. Employees donated documents and artifacts they thought were important, including products and prototypes. In fact, many of the historical products were gathered in an archival version of dumpster-diving where librarians collected them from hallways and trash bins when employees cleaned out their offices after being laid off.
In the Apple Library, we put our heads down and kept doing our jobs. But change came knocking one morning in the fall of 1997 when we received a frantic phone call from an employee in the offsite warehouse where the museum collection was stored. He had orders to clear everything out of the warehouse and shut it down, and the deadline was in 24 hours. If we wanted our boxes, we had to come and get them NOW or they would be destroyed.
Then our director, Monica Ertel, received word that Steve Jobs wanted to see the library and hosted him for a tour. She started with the shelves of materials in the library proper holding thousands of technical journals, books and Apple product manuals.
Stanford was thrilled to accept the donation. Our caveat: they had to take the entire contents of the library because we did not have time to separate out the historical materials. That meant Stanford had to take thousands of books, magazines, videotapes and actual products which normally would not be part of an archives collection. They agreed and sent over additional boxes and two of their staff. Our director managed to get a layoff extension to October 31 for the 3 Apple staffers that worked with the historical collection, myself included, and the packing began. We had one month to get everything to Stanford.
The task of getting the deed of gift signed fell to our library director, who still reported into R&D. We waited anxiously for weeks, continuing to pack as if everything was going to work out. Finally she managed to get her new VP, whom Steve had brought with him from NEXT, to sign off on it.
"The Apple collections, gathered by Apple's impressive library and archival staff, reflect what amounts to the Apple crusade, as led by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and John Sculley," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford university librarian, director of Academic Information Resources and publisher of HighWire Press. "Stanford is proud to have received this well-organized and complete record of the Apple story to date."
This article is just so personal to me. I used to go to the library often. After having a lunch at Mac Cafe, I stopped by to browse through papers and magazines there. I could not help, since the library had so much of eye candies for me as a fun of Apple products. It seems that we were working there in the same time frame. I had worked there for three plus years starting early in 1995. Some materials in the archives are something I have gone through back then. Definitely good old days.
I was quite disappointed when I had heard that the library would be closed in 1997. Running into the library, I saw you guys were packing things up. It was sudden. I think I asked where the materials are going with no clear answer at that point. That was it. I saw the "closed" sign in another day.
Today a good friend of mine forwarded me about this article. I am so grateful that you guys saved those materials. Thank you. Thank you. Hopefully I have a chance to browse through some of them at some point.
I had heard about the Apple Archive at Stanford, but I failed to look into the specifics of what this archive was prior to its donation. The Apple Library at Infinite Loop! Very cool. I went to work at Apple in 1999, so I missed out on the days of an on-site technical and historical library. That's too bad because I love this stuff. And my favorite detail of this account was, "a layoff extension to October 31 for the 3 Apple staffers that worked with the historical collection, myself included, and the packing began." That is a sure sign of a dedicated professional that sees their work as having value (and, perhaps, joy) beyond the obvious value of a salary. (I had a similar post-layoff-announcement experience, working until midnight on the last possible day to try and complete a software feature.) Kudos to the (former) archivists at Apple!
I planned to spend a month looking at the vast collection of Apple\u2019s records that Steve Jobs had sent over when he returned to the company in 1997 and decided the new Apple he intended to build would be so forward-looking it could get rid of its museum.
When Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, a dozen years after he was forced out, one of the first things he did was offer Stanford University the company\u2019s corporate archives, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford libraries\u2019 History of Science and Technologies Collections. \u201CStanford had a signed document from Apple\u2019s legal department within 24 hours, allowing it to transport some 800 boxes from the company\u2019s campus to the university.\u201D
And now I can\u2019t let it go. Because when it comes to creating\u2014or not creating\u2014myths, the story of how a collection is created and the context of its donation are just as important as the interpretation of that collection by historians.
A \u201Creal\u201D archives would contain the records produced during Apple\u2019s course of business, and they would be kept together in the order in which they were produced. A traditional executive correspondence file is a good example. But in the fast-paced startup world of Silicon Valley, it\u2019s rare that a company keeps traditional records. So how did the Apple Archive come to be?
The Apple library remained in the R&D group with serving engineers as its priority, but it didn\u2019t take long for other Apple groups\u2014such as PR, Marketing, Legal and Sales\u2014to find this resource, and they wanted historical information. So Apple librarians began collecting price lists, timelines, product data sheets, press releases, annual reports, executive speeches, policy pamphlets, news clippings\u2014anything they deemed of historical use. The library eventually formed a history specialty group of library staff with a charter to \u201Cprovide quality support to library staff and Apple employees who are seeking information about Apple\u2019s history\u201D and to \u201Cmaintain an accurate, timely and easily accessible [historical] collection.\u201D This \u201Chistorical collection,\u201D painstakingly collected and curated by librarians over a period of 15 years, was part of the donation to Stanford.
Sadly, Apple never funded or built a museum, and eventually the Apple Library took the responsibility of storing the materials that had been gathered. We called these boxes the \u201Cmuseum collection.\u201D
I worked as a librarian for Apple during what were probably the two most fraught years of its existence. From 1995 to 1997, Apple employees endured the ouster of CEO Mike Spindler, the appointment of board member Gil Amelio as the new CEO, the largest quarterly loss in Apple\u2019s history, the surprise $400 million acquisition of Steve Jobs\u2019 company, NeXT, and the return of Steve (after leaving the company in 1985), first as a \u201Cspecial advisor\u201D to Amelio, who eventually resigned, and then, by September 1997, Interim CEO. All of this was accompanied by relentless layoffs (1/3 of the workforce) and the steady drumbeat of constant rumors.
Several of us jumped into a car and sped over to the warehouse where we were greeted by a scene of complete chaos: trucks, dumpsters, people rolling office furniture and equipment around a giant parking lot and everyone yelling in an atmosphere of complete panic. I got out of the car, looked around and thought, \u201COh, so this is what it looks like when a company is collapsing.\u201D We grabbed our boxes and stuffed them into a back room in the library that was also home to the HVAC system.
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