If we're talking legal ownership... a significant portion of the collection has been 'tainted' by artifacts owned by Infoage (namely the Grabbe collection, or a *portion of* the Grabbe collection) which have mingled with the MARCH/VCFed collection for years. Many details regarding this have only resurfaced recently (as in the past year, though several long-time members have always known some portion of the details) and it's been something of a massive headache to untangle, especially given the lack of a unified inventory for the past 19 years of acquisitions - I've found a few spreadsheets with no more than a few dozen items each, at most, which is nowhere near the thousands of individual artifacts which are now (or were in the past) within the warehouse/collection. It has taken me many, many hours of research, digging, and questioning to identify as much of the Grabbe collection as I have thus far - which could be anywhere between 15% and 75% of the total. There are other Infoage artifacts and collections mixed in - for instance, an entire "ready-to-run" Amdahl mainframe was donated to Infoage by AT&T in 1997. Aside from the 4705 communications processor, which was scrapped over a decade ago, much of the system is still present - but I have no way of knowing just *how* *much* of it is still here because I have no list of items, no photographs of the system as donated, and wide gaps in the admittedly threadbare timeline I have been able to put together for the machine's life since it was donated. Until recently, a number of long-time members believed the entire system to have been scrapped! Until all of these details can be worked out, it is potentially dangerous to assume that everything belongs to VCFed. We are a chapter of VCF, meaning that anything that we own is by extension owned by VCF anyways - but without a formal accessioning policy, the line between 'inventory' and 'collection' doesn't exist, and ownership can remain up in the air. Many recent acquisitions were collected using money from Mid-Atlantic's budget that was itself obtained directly through Mid-Atlantic's own fundraising - an argument can be made that, for such artifacts, VCFed may own them *through* us, but not directly, for whatever difference that even makes. These things need to be defined in writing, not in verbal agreements. Trying to hammer out a formal collections policy - which I have taken on as my personal responsibility - has been severely complicated by the fact that there is no simple answer to the question "what is the collection?" as I've described above, but I'm slowly getting there. And, frankly, the blaring priority as of late has been to address the physical maintenance of the warehouse itself, which we are unquestionably responsible for... alongside Infoage... and Wall township... and, apparently, the Army. Many strange revelations as of late. Feel free to contact me off-list (thomas.gilinsky@vcfed.org) if you'd like to directly clarify anything to me regarding how the details of the collection have been argued - I can always use the info! On Tue, Oct 29, 2024 at 1:06 PM Tony Bogan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Functionally doesn’t change the fact that VCF MA (did we suddenly decide now it’s MARCH without any further discussion? I want MACE seriously considered :-) does not own or have any rights to the collection. This was made abundantly clear to those of us that created the 501c in the first place almost 10 years ago.
Additionally, what was originally intended doesn’t change the fact you just stated. Namely that most of the money comes from National and has since the start.
Just trying to keep the discussion real and on point as a lack of information has been a problem since the start as vid ever by this very discussion.
There have been numerous discussions over the years about the collection, who owns it, what is to be done with it, how it should be managed etc etc. as well as questions raised by those who have donated or who reached out to us for a rescue.
Knowing the potential legal issues that could arise if ever there was an issue, these are important things to not o ly keep in the discussion but accurately disseminate to the membership.
The computers and artifacts are not the property of VCF MA, MARCH or even MAACE :-) :-)
Functionality not withstanding.
I’ve deleted the rest of my response.
Tony Bogan
On Oct 29, 2024, at 12:54 PM, RETRO Innovations via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
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