Saving Automotive History — Part 5: The Digital Library — The Concept

Images of this quality — like this 1951 Lincoln can be found in our Library in both the Print Advertising and Automotive Brochures Sections.

The Society’s website has been designed to be a “Library”. It is an Internet storehouse of both:

• High-resolution PDF images of paper documents, artwork, manufacturer published materials and
• Informative articles and technical materials collated and written by the Society’s staff or contributors.

All materials are available and downloadable to:

• Assist, educate, enlighten, and inform the visitor about automotive history.
• Act as a reference tool (much of our material is primary source) for enthusiasts, educators, students, writers, and researchers.
• Make available content and accurate information for publishers.

The design and format of the Library:

• Allows visitors to “walk” through the Library and
• Pick the content they want to view or download — without assistance.
• A powerful search engine allows visitors to quickly find distinct items to view.
• Staff is available during normal US business hours to help visitors, if requested.
• Content is downloadable and FREE 24/7/365.

Our Service Delivery

• Our Digitization Plan. Our focus is on making these materials easy to access and retrieve — without human intervention. How? By using the e-commerce approach, and by removing the need to pay a fee to acquire
  the material. Think Amazon — without charges.
• Our Visitor Activity. Because we have made it easy for visitors to find and view our materials, we receive over 100,000 visitors per year who download or view over 700,000 pages of material.

Our April Statistics — Visitors and pages viewed. Almost 56,000 pages were viewed/downloaded & almost 6,800 users visited the site.

The Number of Documents Loaded Does Not Impact Service Delivery.

• Our collections tend to grow at about ten percent per year, however, our visitor statistics never decline! This is due to the nature of our intelligent cataloging, our powerful internal search engine, and the e-commerce software.