Not everything survives, and some of the Museum’s most vulnerable historic items are the vintage magazines that were most often printed on the least expensive and least durable paper available. Meant for quick consumption with high anticipated discard rates, early issues of Model Car Science and Car Model magazines – among others – have started to significantly deteriorate even in the very hospitable Salt Lake climate.
The history and information contained in those early issues of model car magazines cannot be lost. Coverage of the early events in the hobby, together with the great models created by early craftsmen, would be lost forever if each magazine crumbled into dust. Clearly, that isn’t acceptable, and the Museum decided a few years ago that it couldn’t tolerate that inevitable result.
The only viable thing to do was to digitize the back issues. After Trustee Mark Benton created the original scanning protocol, I started to troll around for dedicated modelers who would laboriously scan back issues and then transfer those images to CDs, and a great bunch of guys jumped on board and started scanning.
As each disk is received from our dedicated scanners, we breathe a little easier knowing that the information on one more historic magazine is saved from oblivion.
A special thanks again to the following guys who have worked so hard: Terry Rollins, Dave Cura and Andy Kellock, Roger Yu, Elmore Craig, John Sharisky, Claes Ericsson, Jim Olson, Lindley Ruddick, Dave Mikrut, Dean Eubanks and Mike Swan. And, given his prior hard work for the Museum, we expect great productivity from Tim Burkhardt as well. We also want to acknowledge the great help extended by new member Frank Cura (father to scanner Dave Cura) who has a large collection of Model Car Science magazines that Dave is scanning for the Museum.
If you have a good scanner, the capability to scan and transfer images to a CD, and if you care about helping us preserve the past before it is lost forever, please contact me. You can also read more about the program by visiting that part of the Museum’s web site that describes the Scan the Past program.