Following up on the original posting, which has drifted into a discussion of library collections, this is a significant move for the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. TVRM has also announced that it has entered into a purchase agreement for a five acre vacant parcel adjacent to the Grand Junction museum site. These two purchases will ultimately provide TVRM with much needed administrative offices, classroom and event space, additional parking, a new entrance to the grounds, an extended tail track on the Grand Junction wye enabling bigger trains, and will free up space in the depot for more exhibits. The purchase price for the two properties combined, before improvements, is close to $2 million, and TVRM is launching a fund raising effort to assist with these acquisitions.

Alan Maples

Alan,

This is big news. Am I right to conclude this is the first significant expansion of TVRM property and facilities in over 30 years?

A statistic reported later in the thread, perhaps missed by many or most here, reported by Allan Miller, the author of the original essay in the original post:



Some of this is the same demographic and social-organization shift we've been discussing here for years.



This is in spite of being at least modestly accessible.

I can make the argument that a "library" isn't a library in the public-archive sense if an interested party can't get at the materials, or can only do so through convoluted means (must join an organization, open once a month, etc.). Some of this becomes self-defeating policies--no one does any research because no one can get to the stuff; so no one looks after the stuff because no one comes or cares.

I can contrast two noted archives with which I had to work years ago on a non-rail project. One let you in, let you look through the catalogs, and then made you fill out a request slip for each and every item you wished to access, which would then take 10-30 minutes each to retrieve--perfectly sensible if you're looking for one specific book, but torture if you're looking for photographs. The other put you through a background check that would do the TSA or El Al proud, but once you were approved, and left the contents of your pockets in a locker, they turned you loose in the file drawers holding tens of thousands of photo prints....... Thankfully, both archives have since done wonderful things with putting a lot of the stuff I was seeking online.....

Well, TVRM did lease the four mile Norfolk Southern "Belt Line" through a separately incorporated subsidiary (East Chattanooga Belt Railway) in 2001, and various properties around East Chattanooga including an adjacent warehouse have been added to the portfolio when the opportunities have presented themselves. But the NMRA building and the other adjacent parcel at Grand Junction represent one of the largest capital commitments by TVRM in its history.

Alan Maples

having to show up at some arbitrary location on planet earth...

Hell if they're gonna make you travel to <arbitrary location> to get a document, why not just combine "archiving" and "geocaching" in a fun game? Oh, you want Electric Railway Journal June 1913, well that's at 45.352622 north and 112.316361 west, under a green painted rock in a Tupperware container. It is a 1.7 climb, you won't need gear. Please put the desiccant back.

Honestly folks. The internet isn't new anymore, and law is pretty well settled on doing online librarying. And the answer is yes, you can do it. Now, with DRM, you can even put the most copyright-hot titles up there, simply by assuring you have no more simultaneous online readers as you do paper copies in the vault.

Actually, we (should) have it on a shelf at 39.312267,-76.620723 ................ second floor. Open tomorrow, 10 to 3 or so.



But this only happens if, and when, someone either volunteers to do the digitization/scanning AND host/upload its online presence, OR someone gets paid to do this.

I've done this. I've photocopied entire out-of-print books at the Library of Congress and Universities of Maryland/Delaware. It gets mind-numbing and tedious. It becomes almost as bad as repeatedly reading off the time for the old-time phone dial-for-the-time service--about three hours was all they could take before they cracked. And then you get home and find you missed two pages that stuck together.

A fully-integrated book scanner apparatus--with special platens that keep the book open without breaking the spine, with both image preservation and OCR--costs thousands of dollars. And there aren't an endless supply of trained monkeys/interns available to properly archive and catalog the results, or check spelling, etc. Have you ever worked with library newspaper microfilms where pages were sloppily cut or photographed, chopping off half a column/page of text (always the one you need)? That's what has to be avoided.

That being said, there ARE renegade projects for "DIY book scanning" and the like on the cheap by folks of the "Internet-as-anarchy" school:

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/ ... you-think/

The means are out there. The "cloud" or digital storage is out there. What we, as railroad and history preservationists, need is the wherewithal and will to actually get off our butts and DO this kind of stuff. This is where we need leadership and coordination by the likes of the R&LHS, the NRHS, the various specialist RR societies, and the ATTRRM.

Or we can simply throw in the towel and admit we don't really have a national rail history/preservation movement, but just a whole bunch of narcissistic, myopic projects instead.