Grant Triggers Bay Area Technical History Museum Study.

LOS ALTOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 26, 1998--A 15-year-old project to build a Bay Area Technical History Museum will move a step closer to fruition on Wednesday when a consortium formed for that purpose kicks off a feasibility study.

The kickoff luncheon is set for noon in the second floor meeting room of Kelley Park's Empire Fire House in San Jose and has been made possible by a matching $144,000 grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to the Perham Foundation, Inc. of Los Altos.

The Packard Foundation grant is specifically earmarked for the feasibility study and development of a business plan for the Museum, according to Donald F. Koijane, Perham Foundation President.

Koijane said that several Silicon Valley foundations will be contributing to the overall $288,000 fund, which will support a two-year research project determining the likelihood of building a large-scale facility to showcase the Valley's technological roots.

Establishing the prospects for success of a fundraising campaign to construct the Museum will be a major goal of the study. Other goals include hiring consultants, defining and developing a Museum audience and consolidating the storage of the collections of consortium members.

The Perham Foundation, over which Koijane has presided for the past 10 years, has had a central role in telling how Silicon Valley's inventions and high-tech innovations have impacted the world of data processing and communications. The Foundation was the originator of the Electronics Museum, which was formerly located at Foothill College.

The most significant momentum for the Museum project prior to the Packard Foundation grant was in 1997 when 12 institutions concerned with the preservation of Silicon Valley's history in technology joined the Perham Foundation's Electronics Museum in pooling their resources and ideas to form the consortium that is now driving the project.

The consortium's members are the California Historical Radio Society, Computer History Association of California, the History Museums of San Jose, the Palo Alto Historical Association, the Sunnyvale Historical Society, the Computer Museum History Center, Museum of American Heritage and the Tech Museum of Innovation.

Hewlett Packard Archives, the Intel Corporation Museum and Stanford University are consultants to the consortium.

As its first undertaking under the terms of the Packard Foundation matching grant, the consortium will complete a work statement for its consultants by the end of the year.