Donations

The bedrock of our work here at the Centre for Computing History is our collection. Since we moved to our current Cambridge site in 2013, we have acquired a fantastic range of objects, and we have you and hundreds of other donors and visitors to thank for it.

If you would like to donate an item to the Centre's collection, please contact us at collection@computinghistory.org.uk. .

****It is imperative that contact is made via email first and not by phone, as we need a clear paper trail for all donated items****

If you have anything you would like to offer us, could you please consider the following.

Please let us know if you are able to deliver the items to us in Cambridge. We can only travel to acquire very desirable objects.


Please note that we do not accept donations brought to the Centre without first being confirmed beforehand.  This rule will only be changed for items of exceptional interest.

Do your best to explain to us why your object is so special! Does it have a fascinating story attached? Does it represent a technological breakthrough? Let us know.

Please do NOT send us items in the post without agreeing it with us first. Even if you acknowledge that we can do what we want with the items, such donations represent additional archival work that takes up valuable staff and volunteer time.

It is very helpful for us to have an inventory of objects when donations come in. For guidance on preparing an inventory, please read this document.

We also take a limited number of items into the Centre in order to sell them and raise funds, typically when we already have the items in question in our collection already.  This means we're interested in taking in even fairly common machines. If we have this plan in mind for your object, we will let you know.

If you would like to browse our Collections Development Policy, you can do so here.

 

Financial Donations

As a non-profit organisation, we need monetary donations to enable this very exciting initiative to proceed and to fill gaps in our collection. If you feel that you would like to help us financially just click on 'donate' at the top of this page.

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