Auto History and Competing Interests — Why It Shouldn’t Happen . . .

And What We Can Do About It

Hundreds of thousands of historical automotive documents are unknown because we don’t share information

Every day, those of us involved in the preservation of automotive history, stumble across material held by private interests, museums, libraries, archives, public trusts and the like. We “stumble across it” because the only way to discover it is by hugely complex detective work. Why?

Worse, even if we were to discover a cache of materials related to a specific subject, it’s very likely that other related materials — perhaps even part of the same collection — will be unmentioned or seemingly unknown to the located repository or the discoverer.

It is maddening to find that one small piece of information — tantalizing and exciting is found, only to discover that the remaining and sometimes critical data is gone or in some inaccessible location.

A dramatic page from the 1954 Muntz sports car brochure? Is it? Or is it just an abstract rendering? We don’t know, because the remaining images are not available online or in any available index.

Building a Global Index

Why can’t we, with little effort, develop an index that would determine where information that auto enthusiasts, researchers, auto writers, students and educators could use?