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Gene and Jerry, sorry that you two could not make Austin, it was a very enjoyable convention and a good chance to renew acquaintances with friends. I did not make it to Austin in time to observe the board of directors meeting, so will leave that part of your question for others to comment. However, I have been part of the digital archives team for a few years, and can offer my own thoughts from that perspective.
There are logistical IT-type challenges to putting material behind a “member only” wall, as well as questions about what material should be member only, what should be accessible to the general public (to hopefully encourage MPHS membership), what postings would be of interest or benefit to most members, etc. Should the member only section be simply password protected web pages, or should it be some arrangement to allow on-demand downloads, such as is offered by some of the more advanced rail historical society archives? My sense is that MPHS continues to overcome those challenges and hopefully this coming year will see the beginning of a member only section. In the meantime, material continues to become available for scanning, often with a definite timeline before it is to be returned to the owner. With a limited number of volunteers, a lot of effort is put into getting new source material scanned, getting the resulting digital files named so they can be retrieved, etc.
While wrestling with the details of how the “member only” section should be developed, it was the consensus of the digital team (and endorsed by the board) that a number of CDs should be produced using MPHS archive material that has been digitized. The CD option makes a large volume of archival material on a specialized topic available to members relatively quickly, thus hopefully demonstrating the benefit and value of the MPHS Archives. Recent CD topics include (1)Terminals 1928-1959, (2) Accidents 1931-1960, (3) Illinois Coal Mines, (4) Passenger car Diagrams-1963-1978, and (5) Passenger car diagrams – heavyweight cars & wood cars. (The latter just became available at Austin, and will soon be added to the on-line company store.) Each of these CDs required many hours of volunteer labor to properly orient, crop and edit hundreds of images in each CD for optimum viewing.
As Jerry noted, there are always more projects available than there are volunteers.
Bill Pollard
