In May of 2007, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park, received the extraordinary gift of Deena Larsen’s personal collection of early-era personal computers and software. Deena is an author and new media visionary who has been active in the creative electronic writing community since its inception in the 1980s. In addition to being a writer and thinker, Deena has also been a collector and an amateur archivist (or, as we say of amateurs, a hoarder). Collecting and hoarding, it turns out, are very important activities, since too few of our cultural institutions and repositories are yet engaged with acquiring and saving the rich and various creative legacy we have inherited from the first generation of personal computing. The arrival of Deena’s collection at MITH furnishes us with invaluable source material which will further both our in-house research in digital curation and preservation, as well as function as a unique primary resource for the growing number of researchers interested in early hypertext and electronic literature.

As Deena writes in an autobiographical statement she submitted with

the collection:

"I conducted writers workshops at theseconferences and even online.  We worked together to develop critiques—but more importantly methods of critiques—of hypertext, as well as collections of schools of epoetry, lists and groups.   And thus I have been lucky enough to receive and view texts in their infancy—during the days when we thought floppy disks would live forever.  And thus I amassed this chaotic, and perhaps misinformed treasure trove that I could bequeath to those interested in finding the Old West goldmines of the early internet days."

The collection therefore includes not only Deena's own extensive literary output, but original and sometimes unpublished material by nearly every significant member of her circle, effectively making it a cross-section of the electronic writing community during its key formative years (roughly 1985-1995). The files contain multiple versions of Deena’s Marble Springs and other Hypercard works (some unpublished), multiple versions of her Samplers and other Storyspace works (some unpublished), multiple versions of nationally recognized poet William Dickey’s electronic works, Dickey’s student work, nationally recognized poet Stephanie Strickland’s works, M.D. Coverley's works, Kathryn Cramer’s works, If Monks had Macs, the Black Mark (a hypercard stack developed at the 1993 ACM Hypertext conference), Izme Pass, Chris Willerton’s works, Mikael And’s works (the author himself no longer has copies), Jim Rosenburg’s works, Michael Joyce and Carolyn Guyer’s works that were in progress, Stuart Moulthrop’s works, George Landow’s works and working notes, textual games from Nick Monfort, Coloring the Sky (a collaborative work from Brown in 1992-94), and Tom Trelogan’s logic game. The hardware in the collection consists of eight Mac Classics, a Mac Plus, and associated accessories; the physical media includes some 800 diskettes, as well as nearly 100 CD-ROMs and Zip disks. The collection also contains manuscripts, newspaper clippings, books, comics, manuals, notebooks, syllabi, catalogs, brochures, posters, conference proceedings, and ephemera.