ACM Digital Library Archive Is Open Access With 50 Years of Published Records

As part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary celebrations, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is 'opening up a large portion of its archives, making the first 50 years of its published records -- more than 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000 -- accessible to the public without a login,' writes Ernie Smith via Associations Now. From the report: Vicki L. Hanson, the group's CEO, noted that the ACM Digital Library initiative is part of a broader effort to make its archives available via open access by 2025. 'Our goal is to have it open in a few years, but there's very real costs associated with [the open-access work],' Hanson said. 'We have models so that we can pay for it.' While the organization is still working through its open-access effort, it saw an opportunity to make its 'backfile' of materials available, timed to the organization's 75th anniversary. 'It's nice to link it to the 75th celebration year in general, but the emphasis was really coming from what it takes to get the Digital Library fully open,' she said. 'All those seminal articles from years ago can be made available to everyone.'

The collection has some of what you'd expect: technical documents, magazine articles, and research papers, many of which highlight the history of computing -- for example, one of the first documents ACM ever published was about the groundbreaking UNIVAC system. But the treasure trove also goes to the heart of ACM itself, with a number of pieces related to the creation of the organization and how it was run, with in-depth records from early conferences included within the digital library.

The opening of ACM's digital backfile is one of many components to marking the organization's 75th anniversary -- the largest of which, a celebratory panel, will take place June 10 as a hybrid event that will bring together well-known figures in computer science, such as noted social media scholar danah boyd of Microsoft Research, Stanford University's Jure Leskovec, and Google chief economist Hal Varian. ACM is also highlighting its history on its social media channels, including by showcasing notable papers within its archives.

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