After John F. Kennedy's assassination, his memory was re-curated by his widow, who imagined him as a fallen King Arthur in a modern-dayCamelot.
Some historians are wondering if Laurene Powell Jobs is trying to frame the legacy of her late husband, Steve Jobs, a complicated and transformational figure who was shadowed by his flaws as a father and a boss.
Ms. Powell Jobs introduced the archive. It aspires to be like Mr. Jobs in that it will remake music with the iPod and communicate with the iPhone.
The Steve Jobs Archive will not be a repository of personal correspondence, notes and items for public research, as other influential figures have done, according to Ms. Powell Jobs. The majority of those ideas are Mr. Jobs's.
For now, it is more of a tribute website. The New York Times spoke to more than a dozen people who questioned whether it was an archive. Historians worry that it may inspire other wealthy and influential figures to look at the historical record about them in a similar way that ordinary people do on social media.
One of the things that makes me excited about archives is the fact that there are many different things to look at. We shouldn't shy away from people being complicated.
Other famous business leaders have mostly left their material to the archives, but the Steve Jobs Archive is different. Half of Harvard Business School's 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public.
The papers of business pioneers such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc were given to the companies they built.
Some companies, such as the Walt Disney Compan y, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research, even though much of the corporate archive material is closed to the public.
The director of the Disney archives doesn't censor. We don't do anything else.
The new Jobs archive contains eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive says is Mr. Jobs's "driving motivation in his own words." Three-quarters of the items are public and can be accessed by clicking through Mr. Jobs's maxims.
There is a lot of mystery surrounding the next steps for the archive. Powell Jobs hired a documentaryFilmmaker to gather hundreds of oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues Who will have access to that material has not been disclosed.
The director of the archive refused to say if the collection would be open to researchers or if there would be any controversial material about Mr. Jobs. The author of a best-selling book about Mr. Jobs said in an email that he wasn't contacted to contribute.
The project has been led by Ms. Powell Jobs. She met Mr Jobs while she was a graduate student. She used her estimated $16 billion fortune to fund the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic and commercial operation that owns The Atlantic magazine and is trying to reduce gun violence.
Mr. Jobs encouraged historians to preserve the history of his predecessors such as Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel. He didn't put much value on his own history, and Apple rarely commemorates product anniversaries.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1997 was to give the company's archives to the university. A signed document from Apple's legal department allowed the university to transport 800 boxes from the company's campus to the school.
Photos of a barefoot Mr. Jobs, advertising campaigns, and an Apple II computer are some of the items that were cataloged byStanford. Students and researchers can review that material.
There are letters, slides and notes from William Hewlett, who founded Hewlett-Packard, and Andy Grove, who was the chief executive of Intel.
The Silicon Valley archives are being used to teach students about discovery. He said that a mix of materials in a box introduces uncertainty.
A biography of Mr. Jobs was published after he died. The book misrepresented the life of Mr. Jobs, and some at Apple felt that was a bad thing.
Mr. Isaacson wouldn't say anything about those complaints.
A film based on the book was made four years later. The movie focused on Mr. Jobs being ousted from Apple and denying that he was the father of his oldest child.
After a hack of Sony Pictures, Ms. Powell Jobs tried to stop the film. She thought a movie based on the book would be wrong.
Mike Slade was an adviser to Mr. Jobs from 1998 to 2004. I can't believe how upset Laurene was.
The Steve Jobs Archive was registered in Delaware and California after the movie was released. She hired Davis Guggenheim to make a documentary about Mr. Jobs. Ms Berlin was hired by her to be the Jobs Archive's executive director.
Mr. Guggenheim also worked on a documentary about Bill Gates. The man who worked for both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates stopped to change shirts while interviewing one of the executives.
Ms. Berlin and Ms. Powell Jobs were working together. Audio of interviews with reporters and early company records were some of the items they collected. During his decades as a pioneer of Silicon Valley marketing and adviser to Mr. Jobs, there was a document in his personal collection that outlined what the company stood for.
The group of advisers assembled by Ms. Powell Jobs included Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer, and Bob Iger, the former chief executive of Disney.
Mr. Cook, Mr. Ive and Mr. Iger didn't say anything.
Ms. Berlin wouldn't say how she works with Apple to get access to the material left by Mr. Jobs.
There is an email that Mr. Jobs sent himself at Apple. He relies on others to provide everything from the food he eats to the music he likes.
He said he loves and admires his species and is dependent on them for his life and well being.
There is an audio clip from a 1984 interview that Mr. Jobs did with a journalist. Mr. Jobs said that Apple used trial and error to develop its products.
The recording was lying in a drawer.
The archive is important to preserving Mr. Jobs's legacy. Many of them support it.
He said there was a lot of distortion about who Steve was. Something more factual was required.
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