I would like to ask for the views of the other contributors to this forum on the potential usefulness of a library to archive and distribute diesel locomotive technical information in .PDF of other electronic formats. I am not thinking just of the common items like locomotive operators manuals, but rather the more difficult to find items like locomotive specification books, parts catalogs, maintenance instructions, general service bulletins, parts and rebuild bulletins, product data books, and publication index sheets issued by all the diesel builders.What I am talking about here is the means of making information useful to people doing restoration projects, research, writing, etc., not just having it sit on a shelf in a place where people have to travel to it in order to see it. Can you think of any existing organizations that have current projects involving this type of activity?

The Pullman Library (http://www.irm.org/history/pullmanlibrary.html) is an example of what you suggest. For all matters Pullman related, its the place to research it. They'll make copies of drawings for a fee to recoup their costs.

I think this would be an excllent idea, not just for the preservation industry but for short line operators too. However I have to wonder about the legal ramifications of some of offering some of the prints. Our Mech. Department just spent four hundred dollars on a set of electrical prints for a GP-40. That's got to be more than just the price of duplication, I would think at that price some body owns the rights to some of this stuff.Ben

Ben, thanks for your comment. If you went through RSI to get those prints from EMD, which is the usual route for a shortline or a museum, you were paying for several peoples time to go through a rather lengthy request process plus the cost of having them printed. EMD has only a few technical people to handle these types of requests.EMD actually did not copyright locomotive service technical publications until very recently. Virtually all the material produced from the 1930s through the 1980s, the period of time presently of greatest interest in locomotive preservation, was not copyrighted. However it is often very hard to find the publication indexes and parts catalogs to identify information and material for older or less common locomotive types.

A word of caution here: When the USA became a signatory to the Berne Copyright Convention (in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I believe) some significant changes to U.S. copyright laws were implemented. Perhaps most significant to users of copyrighted material, was the elimination of the requirement to print a copyright notice and/or register the document with the U.S. copyright office. Thus, even if a document does not carry the familiar "Copyright (c) xxxx by . . . " notice/statement it does not mean there isn't a person or organization that holds the copyright to the document. You, or the organization proposing such an archive, would be well-advised to first consult an attorney specializing in copyright matters before proceeding. -- Ray

That's a very interesting point, Ray. It would also lead to the obvious follow up questions of who, if anyone, holds the copyright to material that was published prior to the adoption of the law and did not have any original copyright notice, and how to determine if there is a copyright holder in the case of companies that have been sold or have ceased operation entirely.

That's where the attorney specializing in copyright law would come in. They would have a staff and/or contacts knowledgeable in tracing the ownership (creator) of such documents. -- Ray

I have a parallel discussion going on with friends at EMD about the General Service Bulletins (1936-1953) and MI's (1953 and later) that EMD publicly announced (many years ago) were "obsolete" and no longer being printed. Many of these topics pertain to equipment which is now considered to be historically significant, and the documents would be of interest to those doing restoration work if they were still available in some format. Will keep you informed.

While the "Pullman Library" at IRM is nice-how about an 'electronic museum' vs. the bricks and mortar variety ?In other words, in leiu of leased space on some server-how about a legacy server set up with access to the 'net via a DSL or cable modem ? Anyone have experience doing this ?

As a general remark, I would say the hurdle to oversome is not the dollar cost, which is negligible, but the people cost to organize the materials, get them online, fix server crashes, deal with customer service emails, and so on. Our experience with RyPN has been, to be honest, that few people have the staying power to support online resources for the long haul of years on a purely volunteer basis. This is not a slam, its just reality--people burn out, lose interest, get busy at work, have kids, or have health issues, and slip away. I'm facing some of these issues myself right now in relation to my own work supporting RyPN.I'm not trying to discourage the creation of such a resource, its a great idea. I am trying to encourage anyone who does it to think carefully about how sustainable it will be when the first one or two volunteers burn out, as they almost certainly will. Housing it in an institution that would have the capability to recruit replacement personnel may be a better idea than trying to do it freelance, unless the freelance personnel are both patient and dedicated over the long haul of years.

Here is the real skinny, direct from the U.S. Copyright Office web site at:http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hlcWorks Originally Created and Published or Registered before January 1, 1978Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured either on the date a work was published with a copyright notice or on the date of registration if the work was registered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre-1978 copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years. Public Law 105-298, enacted on October 27, 1998, further extended the renewal term of copyrights still subsisting on that date by an additional 20 years, providing for a renewal term of 67 years and a total term of protection of 95 years.Public Law 102-307, enacted on June 26, 1992, amended the 1976 Copyright Act to provide for automatic renewal of the term of copyrights secured between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Although the renewal term is automatically provided, the Copyright Office does not issue a renewal certificate for these works unless a renewal application and fee are received and registered in the Copyright Office.Public Law 102-307 makes renewal registration optional. Thus, filing for renewal registration is no longer required in order to extend the original 28-year copyright term to the full 95 years. However, some benefits accrue from making a renewal registration during the 28th year of the original term.For more detailed information on renewal of copyright and the copyright term, request Circular 15, "Renewal of Copyright"; Circular 15a, "Duration of Copyright"; and Circular 15t, "Extension of Copyright Terms."It would appear that all the extensions hinge on whether the original material was either registered under existing law at the time of publication, or published with a copyright notice, which most books, pamphlets, and manuals routinely were. Engineering drawings, schematics, etc. MAY not be covered because they MAY have never met the original criteria for copyright protection, but as someone else has stated, you need to check with an attorney that specializes in intellectual property law. Even so, enough of the material will be under copyright that no complete collection will be able to be assembled, so it won’t be of much use.

Comments on Erik's earlier posting: The substantial effort involved in organizing and cataloging a collection of information becomes a central consideration in whether a viable library could be established. A great deal of the effort in being able to locate technical information pertaining to diesel locomotives manufactured many decades ago centers around building accurate indexes of the publications, and unfortunately original indexes are extremely rare because they got so much use over the years that they generally were more deteriorated than other documents. Going back to the EMD analogy, you can sometimes find old Maintenance Instructions and more rarely you come across some of the General Service Bulletins (very rarely I might add), but try and find a summary index of EMD service publications issued close to a time when they changed their publications system (like 1953 or 1954 in the case of EMD). Those indexes are priceless, they show the sum total of what had been issued up to the point the system was changed (like an all-time production listing). There may be a few such indexes that have survived, but they are likely sitting in a binder on a shelf somewhere without anyone realizing their value. Without them you are faced with a tedious exercise in database building to catalog the items you have in the library. It is a lot of time and effort for volunteers, but is essential to allow you to describe and locate materials in response to questions. Unfortunately after all the effort a new database still does not tell you if you have everything that was originally printed. Original diesel manufacturers publication indexes are the only way to get an idea if your collection of material is complete. Another reason that an electronic means of archiving them and making them more widely available (in the rare cases where they can be found) might provide a useful service.And Dennis, thanks for your excellent posting. Lots of good information there.

After reading through the recent posts I have to respectfully disagree with Dennis on one small detail, I feel that incomplete libraries of locomotive information are of considerable use as I have been using one such collection for several decades. Of course if you have only a portion of a particular manual or publication it may be of limited usefullness, but documents like the EMD General Service Bulletins and Maintenance Instructions are each a self supporting procedure for an individual task, and as such are very valuable aids if you have to work on a piece of equipment that you are not very familiar with. I am happy with any of these documents I can obtain, even if they are going to sit in the binder for a long time.By the way, how rare are EMD General Service Bulletins (the 1936-1953 predecessors of the Maintenance Instructions)? Have you ever encountered them, do you still make use of them?The copyright law observations bring to mind the recent flock of internet auction sellers who buy a bunch of decades old manuals at a train show, copy them to PDF format, put their "copyright" mark on them, and then sell them on line. It would seem to me that a copyright fraudulently applied to material you do not own to start with has got to be a far more serious infringement of intellectual property than someone simply making a copy of a document to help somebody else with a project. If one of these sellers were to try to enforce their "copyright" it would be interesting to see what questions Judge Judy would ask them in court.