ResearchBuzz

The American Motorcyclist Association has put a 50+ year archive of its official publication, American Motorcyclist, up online. The archive spans from 1955 to 2007 (over 630 issues!) and is available through a partnership with Google Books.

The easy way is to go to http://books.google.com and search for American Motorcyclist. If you want a direct URL, though, try this giant link, which will start you at January 1955.

All issues are available for free and are available in full format, including ads and covers. The digitizing is excellent quality though you will have to zoom in to read many of the articles (unless you have spectacular eyes.) How great to read about the upcoming 1955 Daytona Beach Classic, and the ads! I think may favorite one is the full-pager that uses Annie Oakley to sell savings bonds. (The headline: “She shot the ashes off the Kaiser’s cigaret”.)

You can do searches of individual issues, of course, but doing full-archive searches is a little more tricky. I found appending “American Motorcyclist” to my search sort of worked, but in the experimental searches I ran I never felt like I was getting a realistic number of results. Do full-archive searches with caution.

That aspect of search is disappointing, but this archive is absolutely worth a look.

The Revelstoke Railway Museum, in British Columbia, Canada, had a digital archive of images that got wiped out by a computer virus last year, but it’s recently gotten a new grant and is starting all over again! The Revelstoke Railway Museum Photo Archive is currently available with over 600 photos at http://www.railwaymuseum.com/cgi-bin/photo_archive/imageFolio.cgi. (The museum’s collection actually has over 6500 images and more will be added to the online archive over time.)

The archive is divided into categories including Bridges, Tunnels, Equipment, and even Train Wrecks, but the biggest part of the archive is the selection of locomotive images, with over 200 available. That category is further divided into Cabooses (caboosi?), Passenger Trains, Diesel, and Steam Locomotive (again the largest section with over 150 images available.) Images are presented in a galley format with a default of 16 to a page (you can change that to 8 or 12 if you like.) The listings show thumbnails, number of hits, size of image (in Kb, not dimensions) and the date it was added. (There’s also a spot for ratings but I didn’t see it used much.)

Click on the image and you’ll get a much larger image and a description, usually brief, sometimes not helpful (“View of unknown steam engine.”) Available sizes are somewhat limited; I was disappointed that I couldn’t zoom in more on the pictures. You can send pictures as an e-postcard, but I didn’t see any links for further manipulation.

Actually all the fun stuff for this archive seems to be at the nav at the bottom of the pages. There you can get the newest pictures (the most recent ones were added 3/17) as well as a random selection and the most-viewed and top-rated images. There’s even a ten-second slide show mode, so you can pick a category, kick back and watch the pictures go by.

It’s easy to tell that this digital archive is in its early beginnings; there’s a lot of fleshing out to do here. But the categorization breaks down well, some of the photos here are very unusual (top view of a steam engine buried by an avalanche) and there’s a lot, lot more to come. Worth a look.