IBM Corporate Archives

Overview

The IBM Corporate Archives is the official historical archive of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), one of the world's largest and most historically significant technology companies. The archives preserve IBM's organizational memory through documents, artifacts, photographs, film, audio recordings, and other materials documenting the company's technology innovations, corporate culture, global operations, and key figures from its founding to the present.

History and Background

IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and renamed International Business Machines in 1924. The IBM Corporate Archives has been recognized as a significant business archive by the Society of American Archivists and has loaned materials to major museum exhibitions, including the New-York Historical Society's Silicon City exhibit on New York's computing history. As of early 2024, IBM's Heritage and History Collection, which had been housed at a history center in Endicott, New York, was moved to Poughkeepsie, New York while IBM identifies a permanent home for it. IBM Poughkeepsie is historically significant as a major IBM development and manufacturing site dating to 1941 that pioneered early computing and artificial intelligence research.

Collections and Holdings

The IBM Corporate Archives holds hundreds of hours of film and video recordings (including films of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr.), documents, photographs, design materials, product artifacts, and corporate records spanning more than a century of computing history. Holdings document IBM's contributions to mainframe computing, personal computers, artificial intelligence, data processing, and global business operations. The archives' materials have been cited in major academic works on business and technology history, and items are regularly loaned for public exhibitions. IBM's Media Center (mediacenter.ibm.com) provides a digital channel offering access to selected archival video content.

Access and Usage

The IBM Corporate Archives are primarily an internal resource supporting IBM's historical and communications work. Scholars and exhibition curators have accessed the collections through institutional arrangements. Some archival video and photographic content is publicly accessible through the IBM Media Center online. For research inquiries, the Society of American Archivists Business Archives Section has profiled the IBM Corporate Archives.