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31. 2003_08_01_PEARSON 50th ANNIVERSARY, 2003 August 1

 File — Box: 4
Identifier: Box 4

Scope and Contents

On August 1, 2003, the PEARSON Educational Measurement Company, at their facility in Iowa City, held a 50th Anniversary Celebration of the founding of Measurement Research Center, by Dr. E. F. Lindquist (and to recognize, as well, the successor companies that followed, as the result of MRC being acquired by Westinghouse Learning Corporation (WLC) in June 1968, then National Computer Systems (NCS) acquiring WLC in November 1983, and finally, PEARSON acquiring NCS in 2000, renaming the new entity as NCS Pearson, and finally, in 2002, becoming known as PEARSON Educational Measurement Co. I attended this celebration - as a surviving 'old timer' - who first worked at MRC during my SUI student electrical-engineering days in 1956-57, then later returning from a 2-year stint as an atomic-test engineer in Albuquerque, NM to rejoin Dr. Lindquist's MRC Engineering staff as a project Engineer in March 1959. I rode through the WLC acquisition until I resigned in July 1978, and after two years with another company and an NCS Consultant, joined NCS as a full-time employee in June 1980. To add my 'two cents worth' to the 50th Anniversary event at PEARSON's, I prepared a substantial amount of material for display for the attending guests: posters showing early newspaper clippings about MRC, 'early electronic relics' of the first scoring machines, and numerous other documents covering the period from 1953 to 1983. The several posters have already been donated in an earlier JVM Accessions to the University of Iowa Archives, along with the 'electronic relics', and other related material, but this Accession Set #3 [Scheduled for 02 February 2007] contains a 3-ring binder with a consolidation of 60+ MS Word files which cover the dates listed above. Many of the MS Word files have text-transcriptions of the early newspaper articles, with reduced-size JPEG facsimiles of the Original Sources included in the files. Other material in the binder relates to 'recollections' or 'reminiscing stories' submitted by myself and other 'old timers' who had intimate knowledge of the 'early days' of MRC. A companion CD-ROM, containing all of the material in digital form that is in the hard-copy printouts, is also included in a pocket-case in the 3-ring binder. The Introductory Section of the 3-Ring Binder contains additional details about the extent and nature of this material, which the compiler [McMillin] believes may be unique in scope in terms of the extensive coverage of MRC/WLC historical material being readily accessible in one source

Dates

  • Creation: 2003 August 1

Creator

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is open for research.

Extent

From the Collection: 14.50 Linear Feet

Language of Materials

From the Collection: English

Repository Details

Part of the University of Iowa Archives Repository

Contact:
100 Main Library
University of Iowa Libraries
Iowa City IA 52242
319-335-5921