Who has the last word on Steve Jobs? Maybe.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis meticulously arranged her husband’s memory after his assassination, simulating President John F. Kennedy as King Arthur who died in present-day Camelot.

Now, some historians wonder if Laurene Powell Jobs was trying to frame the legacy of her late husband, Steve Jobs, a complex and transformative figure who was clouded by his flaws. as a father and belligerence as a boss.

Last month, Mrs. Powell Jobs introduced the Steve Jobs Repository. It aspires to recreate the personal archive like Mr. Jobs, during his years running Apple, remade music with the iPod and interfaced with the iPhone.

Instead of providing a trove of personal correspondence, notes and entries for the public to study and investigate, as other influential figures have done, Ms. Powell Jobs, who did not respond to requests for comment, said: learned at a conference last month that the Steve Jobs Repository would be devoted to “ideas”. Those opinions are mainly Mr. Jobs’ philosophies about life and work.

The result, now, is more of a tribute site than an archive. More than a dozen archivists and scholars who spoke to The New York Times questioned it even calling it an archive. It has worried historians, who fear it could inspire other wealthy and influential figures to curate their historical records like ordinary people manage their lives. theirs on Instagram.

Courtney Chartier, an archivist at Columbia University who worked on the archives of Martin Luther King Jr. and the papers of playwright Tony Kushner, said: “One of the things that excites me about the archives is the warts and all. “Humans are complex and that’s something we shouldn’t shy away from.”

The Steve Jobs Archive is different from the archives of other famous business leaders who mostly leave their documents to corporate archives or libraries. About half of them Harvard Business School’s 25 Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century left private archives open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.

Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton, and Ray Kroc handed over their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the foundation of the warehouse. company storage.

Much of the company’s archives are closed to the public, but some companies, such as Walt Disney Company, providing personal correspondence, notes, speeches, and other items for authors to study.

“We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of archives for Walt Disney. “We’re just veterinarians.”

New Jobs Archive launches with a minimalist website contains eight videos, audio and text that demonstrate what the archive calls “the driving force behind Mr. Jobs to speak in his own way”. The entries, three-quarters of which are already public, can be accessed by clicking on the famous maxims of Mr. Jobs, including “creating something great and getting it out of there” and “pursuing different paths”.

The next steps for the archive are shrouded in a sort of mystery regarding how Mr. Jobs runs Apple. Of all that is publicly revealed, Mrs. Powell Jobs hired a documentary filmmaker to collect hundreds of historical oral histories about Jobs from former colleagues. Where that document will be stored and who will have access to it have yet to be disclosed.

In an interview, Leslie Berlin, the archive’s director, declined to say whether the collection was open to researchers or included any controversial documents about Jobs. Author Walter Isaacson, who conducted about 40 interviews with Jobs before writing his best-selling book, said in an email that he doesn’t know much about the archive and declined to comment further.

Ms. Powell Jobs was the driving force behind the project. She married Mr. Jobs in 1991, two years after meeting him as a graduate student at Stanford. Since he passed away, she used her estimated assets of 16 billion dollars sponsors the Emerson Collective, a charitable and commercial organization that owns The Atlantic magazine, and funds an organization that is working to reduce gun violence in Chicago.

Throughout his life, Jobs admired and encouraged historians to preserve the history of Silicon Valley predecessors like Robert Noyce, the co-founder of chip maker Intel. However, he places little value on his history, and Apple rarely celebrates product anniversaries, saying they focus on the future, not the past.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, a decade after he was fired, one of the first things he did was provide Stanford University with the company’s archives, said Henry Lowood, the man in charge of the Calendar. Stanford Library’s History of Science & Technology. Collection. Stanford had a signed document from Apple’s legal department within 24 hours, allowing it to ship about 800 boxes from the company’s campus to the university.

Stanford spent years cataloging the items such as photos of Mr. Jobs barefoot at work, advertising campaigns and the Apple II computer. That material can be reviewed by students and researchers interested in learning more about the company.

Silicon Valley leaders have traditionally left their documents to Stanford, which houses collections of letters, slides, and notes from William Hewlettwho founded Hewlett-Packard, and Andy Groveformer CEO of Intel.

Lowood says he uses Silicon Valley archives to teach students the value of discovery. “Unlike a book, which is gospel and all truth, the combination of many documents in one box creates uncertainty,” he said.

After Mr. Jobs died in 2011, Mr. Isaacson, the author published a biography of Mr. Jobs. Some at Apple complain that the booka bestseller, misrepresented Jobs and commercialized his death.

Mr. Isaacson declined to comment on those complaints.

Four years later, the book became the basis for a movie. The 2015 film, written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Fassbender, focuses on Jobs being ousted by Apple and denied paternity of his eldest daughter.

Mrs. Powell Jobs lobbied to stop the film, by public email after a hack by Sony Pictures, the company held the rights to the film. She and those close to Mr. Jobs argued that any movie based on the book would be inaccurate.

“I was offended, and he was my friend,” said Mike Slade, a marketing executive who worked as a consultant to Jobs from 1998 to 2004.

In November 2015, a month after the film’s release, Ms. Powell Jobs had a representative register the Steve Jobs Archive as a limited liability company in Delaware and California. She then hired a documentary filmmaker, Davis Guggenheim, to collect word-of-mouth stories about Jobs from former colleagues and friends. She also hired Ms. Berlin, who was a Stanford project historian on the Apple archive, to be the CEO of the Jobs Archive.

Mr. Guggenheim documented Mr. Jobs while making a Netflix documentary about Bill Gates, “Inside Bill’s Brain”. Slade, who worked for both Jobs and Gates, said he sat down for an interview about one executive, stopped to change his shirt and returned to discuss the other.

Ms. Berlin assisted Ms. Powell Jobs in collecting documents. They collected items such as audio interviews conducted by reporters and initial company records, including a 1976 document that Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founders, called statements. their independent father. Regis McKenna, who unearthed the material in his decades-long personal collection as a marketing pioneer and Silicon Valley adviser to Mr. Jobs, said it Outline what the company will stand for.

Ms. Powell Jobs also assembled a group of advisers to announce what the archives will look like, including Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive; Jony Ive, former Apple design director; and Bob Iger, a former Walt Disney executive and former Apple board member.

Mr Cook, Mr Ive and Mr Iger declined to comment.

Berlin, which has its own archives and corporate archives, is a contributor to the Jobs effort, said Ms Berlin, who declined to say how she worked with the company to gain access. into the document left by Jobs.

The archive’s resulting web page opens with an email that Jobs himself sent to Apple. It’s like a diary entry, outlining all the things he depends on others for, from the food he eats to the music he enjoys.

“I love and admire my species, living and dead, and completely dependent on them for my life and happiness,” he wrote.

The email was followed by a previously undisclosed audio clip from a 1984 interview Jobs did with Michael Moritz, a journalist turned venture capitalist at Sequoia. During the meeting, Mr. Jobs said that improvement stems from mistakes, a multitude of records of how Apple used trial and error to develop devices.

Mr Moritz said of the recording: “It just sits in a drawer and collects dust.

It was clear to those who contributed documents that the archive was to protect Jobs’ legacy. It’s a goal many of them support.

“There is so much distortion about who Steve is,” Mr. McKenna said. “There needs to be something more realistic.”