Even a small Museum such as the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum has a bunch of photos and other documents sitting in drawers needing to be cataloged and or organized. But even if when that's done then what just have a note card saying where everything is, or spend time redoing your website to host all this archival content. One of my goals at the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum is to scan in (are those scanner we currently have gets less than satisfactory results) all our photos and dump them on the Internet Archive https://archive.org/ this would allow anybody in the world to have access to the images in our collection while allowing automatic catalog in an organization through the website tools as well as not having to program and host our own archival system on our website. I encourage other organizations to do this as well as it would help make information more readily available, after all that's at the goal of railroad preservation in general?

Or, if you're more interested in having a solution you control, I've been building online archives for historical orgs for a while now:

https://archive.nhrhta.org/
https://archives.delawarehudson.org/
https://archive.nkphts.org/
https://conrailarchive.thecrhs.org/

If you're contemplating getting your collection online, lets talk: https://workwith.edkapuscinski.com/

Here's my problem:

If you say you are "dumping" your "archives," whichever sense of the word "dumping" you are using, you are essentially saying they don't have any value.

There is always a fine line between "hoarding" your collection where nobody has access to it (or even cares that it exists) and making your collections "available."

You WANT people to know what you have. You want people to be interested in your images, your books, your ephemera, your collected information. You want to share selected images and resources, with appropriate context, to advance your education mission. But if you make it too open and free, there's no control, there's no revenue to keep the lights on and the collection dry and safe, etc. And your great photos will get stolen left and right, without credit and no doubt with erroneous or patently false info with them.

Collections like the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and state archives have a duty to make their resources available to all. I can now download everything I need to assemble a book from the Library of Congress website without going to Washington DC, because those images are out of copyright and they post TIFFs on massive servers for the public.

Smaller, private museums do not suck at the government teat for their funding, and even the few rail museums that do--Pennsylvania, California, North Carolina, York, etc.--are chronically underfunded. They need the revenue to keep taking in more collections.

There are many independent efforts to share resources valuable to historians and modelers--IF you know where to look.

I was recently told of a situation that disappointed me though. A privately run museum is starting to restore a passenger car in their collection. They contacted the State Archives which is known to have drawing of the car they wish to restore. The State Archives responded to them that they have the drawings and would be willing to make them available, which using their usual fee structure amounted to around $3000 in drawings. So, the museum doing the restoration politely declined and is moving forward on their restoration WITHOUT the drawings.

If you have a unique collection, I'm all for monetizing it online, ala NWHS for example, to cover the cost of scanning, hosting and to put a few pennies in your pocket.

8x10 images and smaller are easy to scan in high res with a desktop photo scanner however anything larger than 8.5x11 can get pretty pricey paying someone with a large format scanner if you have a lot of stuff. We have a nice stash of fabrication drawings from PRR's Crestline shops but the cost to have them scanned is crazy. And you'd be shelling out a sizable chunk o' change if you were to buy something like a 42" scanner. Unless your archives are rather large, owning your own large format scanner doesn't make sense.

Unless one happens to fall into your lap... The Conrail Historical Society is actually in that position at the moment. It's not up and running yet, but hopefully by the end of the year.

Ed - If another one falls into your lap, I'd be happy to remove it from said lap.

I'll still defend archives, they've been incredibly valuable to me. When managed as a resource.

Twice I've been challenged to scratchbuild models of locomotives that would seem to be impossible to replicate. Hickory Valley 5, a Lima 2-6-0 from 1899, turned out to have the original and digitized drawings at the California State Railroad museum of all places. I was more than willing to pay for a digitized copy when it was a reasonable price.

And the next shocker was discovering that the real oddball, the Porter 0-6-4, had the drawings for Porter at igenium (museum of industry and technology) in CANADA, and I got the erection drawings from PORTER for a very moderate fee. And got it built. MORE than happy to pay.

"Thank you for your email. We have an extensive collection of H.K. Porter technical drawings in our holdings. We have an elevation and a boiler drawing for the locomotive you are researching. If you were interested in getting copies, we charge $30 per digital scan and a $10 processing fee per order.

If I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards,

Marcia Mordfield

She/ Her /Elle

Officer, Archives/Agente Archives"

So if you are going to do a decent job, and have a usable search, and have a human that can respond to inquiries, don't be afraid to charge for it, although that $3k sounds like it was for EVERYTHING on the car from detail drawings down to overall erection - it could run that high if you asked for every single drawing of every component. I've been in the Pullman library in Union, and it was simply mind-blowing the cubic miles of stuff.

The State Archives of Pennsylvania at least has an online index of the stuff they have and a good description. Within that, I found a gem - the surviving business records of Wheeler & Dusenbury sent to the archives after the business closed. I'm sure my father did that as the last paid employee of W&D. He was the bookkeeper. Nothing was scanned, but the 'box of stuff' and contents are listed as to contents and location for physically locating it.

The Denver Public Library has the 'free' archive of Bob Richardson's photos, which include a treasure trove of local logging works in Pennsylvania pre-war. Every time I look at that I salute him and everyone that ever made that possible instead of dumpstering all of that.

I don't think I'd want that. It takes up the bed of a pickup truck. Splat.

HOWEVER, once it's up and running, perhaps it could be made available for use if you're near Shippensburg PA (which is where I think we'll install it).