Farewell, David Sarnoff Library
| Tuesday 11 Aug 2009, by Hyungsub Choi |
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The downward economy has taken a toll on our neighboring cultural institution in Princeton, New Jersey. The David Sarnoff Library (DSL) is closing its doors at the end of calendar year 2009. On 31 July the final public tour was given by executive director Alexander B. Magoun. Now the library, archival, and artifact collections will be packed and transferred to several different locations around the country, including the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware.
Apart from being a popular site for local student excursions, the Princeton library has been a repository of valuable information on some of the most important technological advances in the 20th century. Since 1942, when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) consolidated its research and development function at Princeton—a site equidistant between RCA’s two major manufacturing divisions at Harrison and Camden, both in New Jersey—scientists and engineers at the RCA Laboratories came up with world-changing innovations, from vacuum tubes and transistors, to radio and television, to liquid-crystal display and facsimile technologies. DSL’s RCA collection includes laboratory notebooks of virtually every scientist and engineer who worked there since the 1940s.
When I visited DSL last week, I ran into Benjamin Gross, a Ph.D. candidate in Princeton University’s program in history of science. Ben will be joining us at CHF as Charles Price Fellow during the coming academic year. He is currently working on a dissertation tracing the detailed experimental pathways in the invention and development of liquid-crystal display, based on his analysis of the laboratory notebooks of many RCA researchers during the 1960s and 1970s. It is heavy-duty historical practice that Ben is undertaking. He is currently rushing to make all the photocopies he needs from DSL’s vast collections. We will be hearing more about how he might weave that into a fascinating narrative of invention and innovation when he arrives next month.
As with Ben, I had also relied heavily on DSL’s collections for my own dissertation research, which examines the story of transistor technologies as they spread across organizational and national boundaries within and outside the United States, the story in which RCA played a major role. I will be taking a six-month leave from CHF as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo, to focus on turning this research into a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Manufacturing Knowledge in Transit. DSL will no longer be operational by the time I come back. But I will be bringing a bit of DSL along with me. Farewell.
Images courtesy of Hyungsub Choi
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A small correction in that the board decision on the disposition of the collections: the Hagley Library is one of the finalists for the David Sarnoff Library’s archival holdings. The board will make its final decisions in September.
Thanks for the clarification, Alex. My best wishes for a smooth transition.
[...] This post was Twitted by herbison [...]
[...] Ben: Well, I am in the lucky position that many of my research objects, the group of chemists, physicists, and engineers who worked at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and created the first LCDs, are alive. So, in addition to other scholarly work, I ask them to reflect upon this part of their professional lives and compile oral histories. My work also involves going through their LCD-related lab notebooks, which have, for the most part, survived. And then I look at technical reports, engineering memos . . . [For an impression of the sheer bulk of materials Ben is working with, check out the photo Hyungsub Choi took of Ben in action at the Sarnoff Library (Princeton, New Jersey) for the blog The Center.] [...]