University of Maryland professor David A. Kirsch has been collecting business plans of the dot-com era, to preserve an important piece of American business and cultural history: "How will future historians be able to understand the texture of this time? What information will they have access to, to understand the highs and lows? We can't wait 100 years for documents to wend their way into historical archives. We've got to act now." Kirsch and his students have created a digital database http://www.businessplanarchive.org listing more than 2,300 companies so far, mostly from 1997 to 2002. Kirsch says, "I call it 'Open Source History' -- history that is to be written by the people who lived it. History tends to be from the voices of the elites. I want to know what the receptionist was thinking, not just the chief executive." This has been added to Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:15 AM
