Warbird Information Exchange

What makes a library a good resource for the aviation museum it is attached too. It depends if its resourced by the government of that country, where wages are allowed and books and manuals are bought with taxpayer money, and even the best facilities are not a problem, and dare I say it the tea/coffee and biscuits are top class.
You then have the other private libraries staffed by un paid volunteers, donated books and manuals, second hand facilities and tea/coffee, plus biscuits that are not in the providore class.
As a private museum your donations can be a mixed bag as you luckily gain a donation form that states the museum if not needing the resource can do what it likes with it.
This donation can go into three categories that are covered by thus. 1.Ow my god look at this. 2. Do we have one and do we need it. 3. The last one comes under, the Beano, Dandy ( British Comics) and the bare tushy monthly category, that then gets turfed into the rubbish bin or sold second hand at the shop.
The subjects are covered by the alphabet and each letter has another range of the alphabet, thus each book and manual has two letters of the alphabet and a number that is not duplicated in the computer, but sometimes by mistake it is duplicated and with smoke coming out of your nose you look for the twit that did it. When you find out it is your mistake, your vast knowledge of the library can eradicate the problem before others see it.
With the knowledge that books and magazines go back to 1909, you also gain the knowledge that the Cessna 172 pilot's notes will one day be an historical aircraft long after you have left this planet and must save the books covering it, so that the future population of the world will gain the knowledge you saved.
The clients that come through your door think that the brand of McDonalds has extended to your library and you will get the information they need in 2 minutes, this has problems built in due to the software not allowing your instant access to the obscure book or manual on the screen, if the information is forthcoming then the next obstacle can be the fact that the book has been put back in the wrong place. They can also be upset due to the fact that their relative or aircraft does not appear on the donated books. This can be because the author was the rear gunner and the relative was the navigator. It remains up to the author to include the other flight crew or not, this can be because of the authors war experiences. The missing aircraft maybe one that did not gain flight and ended in matchwood.
Over the years authors and publishers have written or published the books that sell due to the subjects that are most sell able and this becomes a problem as the Spitfire, Lancaster, P-51, Boeing B-17 saturate your shelves with usually the same information and pictures. The aircraft built by certain constructors and manufacturers are not mentioned due to them being on the nose for what they did or did not do. It is only recently that books from the Eastern European countries are now covering the missing aviation histories over the 20th century. South America is one of these areas that books provide access to the aircraft used and plus the often political wars and quick endings they have. First World War books and magazines are many and now varied about little thought about aircraft and actions especially in the Balkan and Italian area , with Cross & Cockade being a leading magazine on the subject.
Some books that are donated are found to be already on the shelves and you check to see which one is in better condition. You do find that the worst one has a signature written inside the book cover and it can be a pioneer or military pilot with a history, so you keep both good and bad books for that reason. One particular title had the same author but three different publishers, with the books having different coloured covers and sizes, so you keep all three.
The saddest paper work coming into the library is the manuscripts that are half finished, plus the flight crew log books that are signed off by the C.O. and end in a date during the wars.
You rely on your knowledge being without having any problems, until you call the aircraft by the wrong manufacturer, then you wake up to the fact that your are not infallible.
So if you see a librarian volunteer with their head in their hands its because that they have realised that the last 300 inputs into the computer are wrong and they need to be changed, so take pity on them.
I hope that other aviation libraries and librarians give their experiences to this thread.

Might I suggest librarians let us know what books or subjects are required.
I'm sure I'm not alone in trying to find a place for my books when the time comes.

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Remember the vets, the wonderful planes they flew and their sacrifices for a future many of them did not live to see.

John B, Why do you have to be on the other side of the Pacific Ocean and on top of that you would have to travel another 2,000 miles of land to be here in Perth, Western Australia where I am. I hope that some librarian in your part of America writes into this thread. Good luck.

The Cavanaugh Flight Museum has a wonderful library that is available to its museum members. One of my first volunteer projects was to assist in moving the collection to a new room and sorting each item to a new shelf.

I experienced much of what you mention and the difficulty in classifying each item so that it could be easily found by someone looking for books on a specific topic. The simple answer would be the Dewey decimal system, although that falls short, in my mind, when differentiating between a coffee-table glossy photo book on "WWII Fighters" and a book of wartime photos from a specific Fighter Group. In the end, I proposed a clearly labeled chronological theme, with appropriate sub-categories (i.e. WWII, Pacific Theatre, US, Navy/Marine, Fighters) and then there were the inevitable stand-alone topics (i.e. Airshows, Air Racing, Electronics/Radar/Avionics, coffee-table photo compilations, etc)

The flight manuals were another frustration. Often incomplete, and donated without context, a handbook of circuit breaker locations for a DC-10 stands as a lonely tip-of-the-iceberg into a topic worth preserving, yet so esoteric, that the materials will likely be overlooked for decades unless a certain researcher might happen to come calling.

If I had a magic wand, I'd keep the paper collection, but would create a world-wide aviation library system and scan all of these materials into a central database. The materials would then be smartly married with keywords so that the lone researcher in Italy who wishes to know about the DC-10's electrical system could actually benefit from the rare nugget of knowledge housed in a remote archive. The ability to share would be exponentially greater and, the document perpetually preserved in digital form.

All wonderful, but nothing without leadership, will, and a robust budget. The topic is daunting, I think I need a nap.

Ken

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"Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves."

A bottle of Shiraz always helps Ken. I am still doing an audit on donations going back thirty years, its amazing what problems you come across never mind space to put the material in. Our subject list covers 24 subjects and each one a letter of the alphabet.
The library in question is part of the Aircraft Heritage Museum, Perth, Western Australia.
We are going through the problems that appear when you buy a second hand book copier. The copyright issue is one of these. From our earliest book of 1909 up to at least about the 1940s you can digitise them, but what subjects would anyone want. Manuals of aircraft and engines are a must, then biographies and autobiographies are next.
The need to digitise the old books is because of multiple handling by various people and sometimes heavy handling as well. Once they are digitised they no longer need to be touched. They then can be PDF and be able to go on memory sticks and be sold to cover the initial cost of the machine and memory stick. Costs depend on who digitises the material, volunteers or paid people. Unfortunately nothing is free and private museums need to cover costs. The library is open to volunteers and reference people, but not the general public. You only have to see what the general public do to books at non aircraft libraries, what with coffee/tea stains, bread and other food products. We could not police the lending of books and expect no damage.
The down loading to memory sticks would allow people to take them home or go overseas without the original being abused. Still working out which is best and any other problems as we have not started yet. What are your thoughts.

One of the best Aviation Library's in the USA is at the San Francisco International Airport. Really.

Take a look and have a visit on a layover....hours aren't always easy, but they have a special section with signed copies of many of the old works. Earhart, Lindbergh, Doolittle ect...plus a photograph collection that is unbelievable. They are slowly working to get it to digital, but they have so much and are "not airplane people" if you can believe that. They are archivists. A fascinating place.

I disagree however in many aspects of Air Museum library research based on many "pulp" books written about P-51's and other aircraft prior to the 1990'[s. They are generally inaccurate and have many mistakes. There are so many books that are just lousy. Most Air Museum Library's have collections of books that are just restating the same stuff, without the scholarly stuff.

The enthusiast specializing and writing on an aircraft type should endeavor to obtain the best books on the manufacturer, type and then use current knowledge to add to that and then publishing on the net or in print to further the cause. I believe that today the true wealth of knowledge on the "dash number" level of research is best captured by the restorers specific to those types and their forensic experience from disassembly of the chunks of original aircraft.

If you want your own library......The best initial start for collecting reference stuff yourself for many of these types comes from guys like Pete Bowers, who did some great work on early stuff. Add to that the Civilian Juptner series, they are generally correct. For the heavy types, the Putman Series and Rene Francillon made perhaps the best volumes as a basis for any research. Expensive, but available. Interestingly library's have a tough time keeping up with the changes in books these days. Books are expensive now, with the best limited run books costing a fair amount. My Peter Arnold "Spitfire Survivors" books are what I consider to be the best of the new age, and we keep getting neater and neater stuff. The expensive Famous Russian Aircraft Series is something I really want to see in my hands. Many of the Air Britain and the European press books are very hard to find in the USA but are essential too. Kind of an all over the place response, but the library is not a fine tuned sharp tool for most research...

I have so many books I haven't looked at in decades and some I've never read in my collection. I suppose I could put each up for sale, but then that would take a lot of time, the same time I don't have to read. But then I seem to have plenty of time to read time-wasting stuff on the internet.

Not sure where I'm going with this but if there were a list of needs I might recognize a book I have that I'm not particularly attached to. Probably no great reference works unfortunately, most 1970s vintage warbird books of the coffee table or light reference variety.

I could just take it all to the local library but I'm not sure how much it would be appreciated.

It would be a lovely thought if all museum libraries could digitise their books so that others could use them as reference material. But the reality of the situation is that it costs money to digitise books/manuals and they cannot get a good return on what they have. Our machine cost $25,000 Australian dollars second hand to buy, three volunteers were trained in how to use it, but within six months all three had given up volunteering at the museum. Over the next two to three years we had a high turn over of people from another area of people labour. That produced digitised copies of obscure books, missing pages, half finished books and no way of recovering the copied books as they did not assign Dewey letters or numbers or titles as these were on the spine of the book, common sense did not prevail. So it was a waste of time. We are going to attempt doing them from scratch by the oldest years and give each one the Dewey letters and numbers and titles, that way we can then make up a list of books/manuals we have and charge the reference costs accordingly. Unfortunately nothing is free or cheap and our machine needs a person to move the pages one at a time and using two cameras. Although books are donated to us and you would think there should be no overheads, you have four air conditioners going twenty four hours a day, seven days a week to gain the correct atmosphere, as well as other overheads. So unfortunately the free open reference library and sharing costs with other museum libraries would not happen as the next museum to us is about 2,000 kilometres, about 1,000 miles from us. So you see again I can use my favourite saying, It's Catch 22 when it comes to gaining an easy answer.
I came up to another problem in another thread where a person asked for a particular Air Ministry, Publication and Number but no year, which we had. I put a photo of it on the thread but received the answer although it was the correct publication, it was close to about seventeen years after the one he needed and no longer resembled the one he needed. Another problem that came up when doing my audit on books, although Airbus is an Airbus is an Airbus, the Aero Commander went on to be built by other manufacturers, even Mc Donnell /Douglas products became Boeing products, plus De Havilland Canada products will be and are now being built by another Constructor, and although they look the same on the outside, different equipment fills the insides. But do not despair if you need one page or two of information, these can be photographed and attached to a thread or email, but if you want more, SHOW ME THE MONEY.

AirCorps Aviation has a branch; AirCorps Library ( https://aircorpslibrary.com/ ). They have been adding material for a while and are always interested in more. Their focus is generally WWII, but expanding to more and they are extremely easy/fun to interact with. No matter where in the world someone is, the library is accessible for a very reasonable fee. The files are arranged by model or individual parts can be found through the search feature. I would urge anyone that has material that might be of interest to others, if you don't know what to do with it, at least send an email and see if they are interested.

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Always looking for P-51D parts.