Polaroid Donates Tech Archives to Harvard B-School

The Polaroid Corp. has donated to the Harvard Business School’s Baker Library a collection of historical technical artifacts and materials that document its evolution as one of the country’s most innovative businesses. Polaroid’s archives include 1.5 million items dating from the company’s founding in 1937 to the present. Artifacts within the collection include sunglasses, military goggles, 3-D glasses, and examples of many of the camera models and accessories Polaroid produced from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. Portions of the collection will be available for research use in mid-2007.

Notable items within collection are research and development files and patent records that detail the company’s many innovations, including its early work with polarizing lenses and the invention of instant photography. The firm’s marketing and publicity efforts are well documented by an extensive collection of advertising materials, product packaging, and corporate publications.

“Students and scholars in a number of areas – from business history and management to marketing and technology – will benefit greatly from access to these important materials,” said HBS Professor Geoff Jones, one of the school’s directors of research. “In addition to the rich material on path breaking scientific inventions and innovations, this collection allows us to view at close range the corporate decisions and activities of an iconic American company.”...

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GWU Upgrades Financial Info Storage Infrastructure

George Washington University cut a deal with storage giant EMC Corp. to upgrade its entire campus storage infrastructure. GW said it purchased multiple EMC storage systems to support its information lifecycle management strategy in its two datacenters. In each datacenter, an EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 system will be used to manage first-tier enterprise applications including the university’s financial systems, e-mail, data warehouses, and student records. An EMC Clarion CX3-80 will be used to provide second and third tier storage for critical, but less frequently accessed data and departmental applications.

“As information continues to increase, we need to ensure we have the performance, capacity and reliability to accommodate the needs of our faculty, staff, and students while keeping our costs the same,” said Adam Stone, GW’s senior information systems engineer, who said the university had “complete confidence” in the EMC hardware and support organization...

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