Name: Systems and Cybernetics Archives - Landscape Assessment and Analysis
Start: 2026-06-13T14:00:00-0400
End: 2026-06-13T15:00:00-0400

Systems and Cybernetics Archives - Landscape Assessment and Analysis

Saturday June 13, 2026 14:00 - 15:00 EDT

Zoom

The intellectual heritage of cybernetics and systems theory — published books, serials, grey literature,
private papers, audiovisual recordings, software, born-digital networked resources, and early
networked communications — is distributed across personal libraries, institutional archives, and
ad hoc repositories with no shared catalog, no common schema, and no mutual visibility. The
typical generation of the members of the Archives Working Group (WG) for the American Society
for Cybernetics (ASC) holds substantial print collections; the prior generation’s holdings are
increasingly at risk as their custodians age. Grey literature (conference proceedings, newsletters,
technical reports), audiovisual material (lectures, conference recordings, interviews), historical software
(simulation models, early AI programs), and born-digital resources (early websites, mailing
list archives) are especially vulnerable —much of it has no canonical bibliographic record anywhere.
The charter of the WG is to address this situation by identifying and facilitating archiving activities
which are both coherent and feasible, addressing critical needs while suggesting potential solutions.
Those in need of support include institutional curators and collection managers, individual owners
of holdings, and the cybernetics and systems research community at large. Their needs include
canonical bibliographic catalog normalization and creation, facilitation of ways to identify and
share information about holdings (including condition, owner, bibliographic identity, and modality
(text, video, audio)), identification of potential donation opportunities, and databse endpoints and
downloading options.
Current challengines include extensive grey literature, much without canonical identity; multiple
distinct institutional efforts; many scattered personal holdings; an aging constituency; and current
efforts being mainly heroic individuals (e.g. this WG, Tuddenham, Wong, Young, Anderson, etc.).
However, there are also substantial potential assets, including community knowledge and engagement,
and especially a burgeoning technical landscape: the vast productivity gains promised by AI
tooling is very real. It is thus likely that many pieces of a solution may be available.
We recognize the challenges the community faces in understanding how best to approach this set
of problems. As volunteer scholars scattered across the globe, working with global institutions
and individuals, the issues are immense: what’s a vision of what’s possible? what’s reasonable to
presume given available resources? what kind of teaming structure is legitimately feasible? what
new technologies can bootstrap and leapfrog us forward?

Speakers

Cliff Joslyn

Cybernetician at Large | Visiting Professor of Systems Science, Binghampton University (SUNY), Binghampton University

Saturday June 13, 2026 14:00 - 15:00 EDT
Zoom

Pre-recorded presentation

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Cliff Joslyn

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