The preservation of automotive materials, including images, research books, ephemera, and specialized documents has been undertaken in earnest by the caretakers of automotive history at The Revs Institute Digital Library at Stanford University. As a tribute to the automobile and with the idea in mind of preserving the history of something, such as the car, that is so engrained in our culture, Revs has taken upon itself the task digitizing literally hundreds of thousands of historical artifacts so that they can be easily researched and perused now and in the future.
Working with Pixel Acuity, The Revs Institute for Automotive Research, Inc. is digitizing their collection of images using specialized digital cameras. Each slide, negative or print is cleaned and imaged at a high resolution. The images and associated metadata are collected and transferred to Stanford, where they are being accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR).
If your interest lies in the history of automobiles and historical photography, there is no greater repository and caretaker organization for this kind of stuff than REVS, who we had the privilege of visiting for a symposium on the history of the automobile a few months back up at Stanford.
The collection of photographic history stands currently at an astounding 170,000+ images, all tagged with appropriate contextual information and rest assured it is all well organized and easily searchable. You could literally get lost for months on the site. Photography collections include images from Bruce R. Craig, George Phillips, Karl Ludvigsen, Ove Nielsen, John Dugdale, Marcus Chambers, Max LeGrand, David Nadig, Jean Charles Martha, Duke Q. Manor, Web Canepa and William Hewitt. CLICK IMAGE TO VISIT THE REVS DIGITAL LIBRARY
