CarLibrary.org - Collections
April 21,
2016 This webpage
provides an overview of the
automotive collections made with the Greenstone Digital Library software. These
collections originally were exported to self-running (data) DVDs for distribution to car
hobbyists, collectors and museums. This Greenstone operation is described in
a tutorial. In May, 2012, many of these collections were made
available on the Internet. There are eleven
separate "collections" in the Car Library. On
the initial page of the library, click on the logo/image to go to one of
these collections. A guide
to using these collections is here. 1. The Bristol
Owners Club archive
2. The Fabulous
Fifties collection is more than 100 newsletters and special announcements from
this "non-club" organization. The documents are in PDF (text and image)
format and can be searched in full-text by Greenstone. All were classified
with embedded metadata. 3. The Petersen
Automotive Museum collection includes links of few web pages from the museum's website
(Petersen.org)
and personal photos of four exhibits. There are also "digital
assets" in a group titled Digital Library. The digital assets include
"Video Interviews for the Petersen Museum by Bill Pollack"
which is an Excel file list of these interviews. The Digital Library also includes
a few early auto racing programs and a small sample of the "Bob Norton Scan
Project", more fully described below. These are actual "digital assets"
which should be in the Petersen's archive. 4. The Greenstone
demo is a collection which shows some features of the Greenstone Digital Library
software. 5. The
"Frazer Nash Digital Library" is a good demonstration of basing a collection
on an inventory or list of vehicles. The collection is based on a complete list of the
425+ prewar
(chain-drive), the postwar Frazer Nash cars and known "replicas" of
the Le Mans Replica model. This list of the cars and
their details had many "nul" records, because the list was
originally an Excel file imported into Greenstone. However, all of the cars
now
have uniform "metadata" which makes the addition of other photos and
documents related to each car more efficient and consistent. A small
number of the Frazer Nash cars also have images and documents and
documents attached, from personal files. Details about the Frazer Nash
Digital Library New
material is periodically added to this collection as accession/inventory numbers are
linked to the physical items from Frazer Nash files and their corresponding
digital files. Many Frazer Nash books have been added to a "LibraryThing"
database, which was 6. The Southward
Car Museum 7. The
"Digital Car Library Project" is a link to this Car Library
website. It shows that Greenstone can include both static (old) or
"live" websites. This one is live! 8. The
"Sports Car Library" is a larger sample of the '50s - '60s sports car
and racing magazines scanned by Bob Norton: 64 items of 671 publications. More than eight years ago, retired
engineer Bob Norton (now deceased) embarked on a massive scanning project of
early west coast racing newsletters and magazines. Bob scanned these
periodicals to the PDF "image" (only) format, which is not text-searchable. However,
it is feasible to convert these PDF images by OCR software to generate text. One page of one copy of MotoRacing
was processed using ABBY FineReader and it worked very well, with about 95%
accuracy. Bob created a complete
28 page index of the 9 volumes of "MotoRacing" (Index.pdf) which is in
text and image format and searchable. It is included in this Greenstone sample collection. 9. "Automobile Driving
Museum"
is an inventory list of the cars in that Los Angeles museum in a "nul"
record format - explained above in the
"Frazer Nash Digital Library" section. This museum has a g 10. The "Mullin
Automotive Museum" is a collection of personal photos visits to that museum
in Oxnard, California. It includes 188 digital photos of the cars, placard
descriptions and displays. This trial archive was created using photo
captions and "tags" (keywords) added to the digital photos in Google's
Picasa photo editing program. The captions and tags were extracted by
Greenstone as "embedded metadata" to classify and organize the images. 11.
"WOW/Classic Cars Museum" (Nelson, New Zealand) has about 150 personal
photos taken on several visits. This archive includes photos and documents from "Project
'64". The Victory Racing team, which supports and restores the cars of the
Classic Car Museum, is the leader in this project which sent a 1964 Mini to the
Bonneville Salt Flats in 2012 - the Note: The
Greenstone collections of CarLibrary.org have been hosted since May, 2012 on a ThinkPad
T61 system located in Burbank, using (free!) Linux Ubuntu server software and (free!)
Greenstone 2.85 for Linux on a 60 GB SSD (OCZ) disk drive. Email me with any