You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that the crown jewels of Silicon Valley are sitting in two warehouses near Kelley Park in San Jose.

The thousands of photos, documents and electronic marvels — including the early 20th-century building blocks of broadcasting and the thoughts and plans of radio technology pioneer Lee de Forest — have been stashed in boxes and on shelves in cavernous storage rooms there for nearly nine years now.

Some dogged researchers have sifted through the stuff over the years, but the mesmerizing glass vacuum tubes, amplifiers, antennas, water-cooled microphones and prehistoric televisions and radios have been largely out of public sight. You see, the Perham Collection, as it’s known, is somewhat overwhelming in volume and scope — and, to put it charitably, somewhat disorganized — at least for now.

Consider just the portion of the collection that includes the inventions and papers of de Forest, an inventor who refined his Audion vacuum tube in Palo Alto about 1912 and thereby gave the world a way to amplify radio signals.

“I spent a great deal of time going through every box just piece by piece and that was great,” says Mike Adams, a San Jose State professor who relied heavily on the collection to research his recent book, “Lee de Forest: King of Radio, Television and Film.” “But if I had to find something again, I couldn’t necessarily tell you where it was.”

Now there is hope. History San Jose, the latest keeper of the collection, just received an $87,000 grant to begin to professionally catalog some of the most significant parts of the treasure trove. The yearlong project will mean that written descriptions of just what’s in key portions of the collection will be available. And the descriptions will be placed online — on the nonprofit historical society’s website and on a state website that is a repository for information from all sorts of museums, libraries and other institutions.

Best of all, History San Jose administrators and volunteers are hopeful (you need to be hopeful in their line of work) that the dry online information will lead to increased public access to the collection, at least virtually speaking.

“One of our dreams is to take these websites and expand them to a more comprehensive overview of what we have in the collection,” says Cate Mills, a History San Jose archivist who will be doing the new cataloging. The grant, from the Council on Library and Information Resources, covers organizing many of the documents in the collection, including de Forest’s notebooks, diaries and letters.

But Mills expects the work to lead to more user-friendly Web displays of some of the artifacts that are stored with the papers. For the general idea, see www.historysanjose.org, click on “Exhibits & Activities” and then, “Online Exhibits.”

The project is another sign that Silicon Valley’s history is gaining currency as the region matures. The high-tech culture is not by its nature a culture that looks back. But more and more, we’re beginning to understand the importance of looking not only at where we’re going, but also at where we’ve been.

I’d argue that you could draw a straight line from de Forest, who died in 1961, to today. Vacuum tubes, after all, were the precursor to semiconductors. And de Forest was the Steve Jobs of his time. He could be miserable to be around. He was a master of taking existing ideas and transforming them into world-changing and marketable products. He worked at the intersection of technology and art (transforming first radio and then movies). And lest you question de Forest’s Silicon Valley mindset, he was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for hyping the value of stock in one of his companies.

De Forest is just part of what lies in the Perham Collection (pronounced PURR-uhm), which has a fascinating history of its own. It was started and nurtured by Douglas Perham, a radio pioneer, who like de Forest, worked for Federal Telegraph in Palo Alto early last century. When the collection arrived at History San Jose in 2003 after a nomadic existence and years in storage, it was 20,000 items packed in cargo containers, cardboard boxes, envelopes and file cabinets. History San Jose workers and volunteers have pared the collection to about 5,000 items, including some real gems.

There’s the Oscar that de Forest won for his work designing a way to embed audio in film. There’s an Apple (AAPL) I. There are ancient mechanical televisions, pre-World War II radios and more recognizable artifacts like an IMSAI 8080, an IBM PC and Atari game consoles.

For now, they are part of a vast hidden collection. But there is more reason than ever to believe that one day you will know exactly where to go to see them.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.