What Is the IEEE History Center?

The IEEE History Center is the unit within IEEE responsible for preserving, researching, and promoting the history of electrical, electronics, computing, and information technology and of the engineers who built it. Founded in 1980 as the IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, it is staffed by professional historians and archivists and is co-sponsored by Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, where it is affiliated with the College of Arts and Letters. It moved to Stevens in July 2014, after nearly a quarter century hosted at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The Center reports through IEEE's corporate structure and works in close cooperation with the volunteer IEEE History Committee, which sets policy for the historical activities of the organization.

Its remit is both scholarly and institutional. The Center supports academic research in the history of technology, and it also serves as the corporate memory of IEEE itself, documenting the activities of a society whose predecessors date to 1884.

Archives and Oral Histories

The IEEE Archives hold the institutional records of IEEE and its predecessor bodies, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers, together with personal papers, photographs, membership records, and audiovisual material. Alongside the archives, the Center runs one of the larger oral history programs in engineering. Interviews with researchers, inventors, and executives across the electrical and computing professions have been recorded since the Center's early years, with the 250th completed in 1995, and the collected oral histories now number in the hundreds, transcribed and published for open access. The original magnetic tapes have been digitally preserved, which addresses the format obsolescence problem that affects most twentieth-century audio collections.

Milestones and Public History

The Center administers the IEEE Milestones program on behalf of the History Committee. A Milestone recognizes a specific technical achievement of significant regional or global benefit that occurred at least twenty-five years earlier, and recognition takes the form of a bronze plaque installed at the site where the work was done. The list of dedicated IEEE Milestones spans locations on every inhabited continent and includes achievements such as early transatlantic telegraphy, the invention of the transistor, and the first commercial microprocessors. The Center also produces educational material through IEEE REACH, which develops classroom resources that use the history of technology to teach pre-university students, and it awards the IEEE Life Members' Fellowship in Electrical History to support doctoral and postdoctoral research.

The Engineering and Technology History Wiki

Since 2015 the Center has operated the Engineering and Technology History Wiki, a MediaWiki-based open resource sponsored jointly by IEEE and other engineering societies. The site consolidates encyclopedic articles, first-hand accounts written by engineers about their own work, transcribed oral histories, Milestone and landmark records, and digitized archival documents into a single searchable collection. It replaced the earlier IEEE Global History Network and has become the principal public interface to the Center's holdings, alongside the Center's own site and its regular newsletter.

Applications

The IEEE History Center's collections and programs have applications in a range of fields, including:

• Academic research in the history of technology and business history
• Engineering education and pre-university outreach
• Patent, priority, and intellectual property research
• Documentary, museum, and journalism production
• Standards and professional society governance research
• Archival and digital preservation practice