"Entwined Relations: IBM and Its History Research Relations with Journalists, Historians, and Employees"

This presentation briefly outlines 3 examples of how students of IBM's history have worked with the company's archives and with each other in recent years. The first case involved the IBM plant and laboratory in Rochester, Minnesota hiring two historians at the Charles Babbage Institute to write a history of the site in the early 2000s; the second concerns how the firm conducted historical research as part of its 100th Anniversary celebration in 2011; the third concerns James Cortada's use of the archives to prepare his history of IBM, published in 2018. All three projects relied on various archival sources, different relations with the corporation and under varying circumstances. Those will be described to illustrate IBM's archival practices. I will argue that historians are permitted to use the archives within limited guidelines and that archivists have useful finding aids with limited access to historians and that the archives are properly organized and quickly accessible when needed.