Unique devices, drawings and manuals which helped achieve a major advance should be saved. Of course this will often be impractical, but there may be one central item, representative of an era or advance, which can be preserved. Furthermore, a paper record of an entire hardware development can be safeguarded in the form of engineering plans, drawings, models, purchasing records, photographs and machine-readable records. Along with documenting a machine's major use, such items may be important, for example, to someone who tries to recreate a set-up for a museum. Old equipment may also fill a long-felt gap in a museum's collection or may serve as a source of parts to restore some other piece of apparatus.
Pictorial materials are of particular interest for both scholarly studies and education.
These include not only photographs of the technical experts, their families, colleagues and apparatus, but also such items as sketches and engineering drawings. Home movies, tape recordings and the like are rare and valuable. Reprints of computer-related articles are occasionally of interest to libraries and collectors. Ephemeral publications such as instrument catalogs, mimeographed conferenced proceedings and reports, and limited-edition manuals should also be retained, for they are historically interesting and rarely preserved. Where to Save Rot, vermin, flood and fire have invaded the seeming security of attics and cellars and destroyed countless valuable historical documents.