When Wood Became Technical

An essay on the history of the U.C. Wood Library, presented at the 2026 SAH Conference panel "Building the Supply Chain," and published in an abbreviated paper in the forthcoming book Beyond Provenance, edited by Erin Besler and Sarah Hearne.

"Initially conceived in 1925 by Professor Emanual Fritz, faculty in the UC Berkeley Department of Forestry, the establishment of a formal collection for wood was a transference between disciplinary sites. Fritz, an American forestry specialist, first envisioned a research collection of wood specimens in 1925. However, the Wood Collection did not take formal shape until 1929, after a set of specimens previously held by the Botany Department was transferred to the Department of Forestry. The passing of the wood collection from the field of botany to the field of forestry is significant, highlighting a moment when the methodological study of wood and the accompanying purposes of a wood collections shifted from the taxonomic and physiological ordering of plants to the mechanical and technical study of timber for product application. In this moment, wood was not only viewed as a natural resource to be classified and managed, but was elevated to a technical material whose properties could be tested and quantified, foreshadowing the later development of computational material practices whose research depend on the capacity to “informationalize” woods properties into datasets for algorithmic processing."