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= ** HCLE's Mission ** =

The mission - why the museum is necessary
Mission: //To preserve and interpret documents, artifacts and stories relating to the history of computing in learning and education; to make them accessible and usable by educational and computer leaders, historians, practitioners and the public.//

The urgency - why we can't wait
// There is an urgency to our work because the people, documents, and software essential to this work are all perishable. // It is a sad, yet necessary, reality that the pioneers are reaching the end of their lives. The era we study began in the mid-fifties, sixty years ago. As people age, memories fade, and are ultimately buried. After they’re gone, their descendants are tasked with sorting through estates that may include boxes of old notebooks, personal letters, newsletters, photos, home movies, computers, programs - a massive amount of work given to someone in mourning who understandably wants to get past this part of their life. Artifacts are easily tossed away. Our awareness of the urgency is why we are preserving our document collection, recording stories of the pioneers, and reformatting born-digital information that was almost orphaned.

The vision - where we are headed
We have a great opportunity to create a museum that is never dusty or dull. There will be the regular exhibits you can browse through online; and we’ll also have immersive virtual worlds, interactive displays, crowdsourced stories, and lots of teaching software and games you can run on today’s devices.

What it looks like will depend on which online door you come through. If you’re a researcher or scholar you’ll want to use the catalog to find specific artifacts we’ve collected and get links to the technology or topic you’re studying. Perhaps you used one of the early microcomputers way back when you were in school and want to play the old games again. Maybe you’ve never known life without the internet and want to walk your avatar through a 1980s school computer laboratory. Or, if you have no idea what to look for you can browse the picture gallery until you find something that looks interesting, then click on a link or a guided tour to learn more about that item.

Whichever path you take through the HCLE collections, the site is designed to invite you to pose questions about what you see, to discover whatever answers we’ve come up with, connect with other visitors to see what they have to say and then to uncover more.

About the Project - an overview of the project, including the virtual museum Envisioning HCLE - the exhaustive considerations that went into the museums' strategy

The history of LO*OP Center - where we began
Our parent organization, LO*OP Center, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) California public benefit corporation. Its mission: “//To empower people to meet the opportunities and challenges posed by cultural diversity and by technological change through education.// //We believe that human beings must engage in thoughtful development of their own societies, sciences, and selves.// //Through learning we can create a society without losers, a sustainable ecology and a population of people who respect and cherish diversity on Earth.//”