Warbird Information Exchange

Unfortunately, when it comes to aviation museums, libraries, archives, and smaller artifact collections are often neglected. This is evident in the amount of facilities that do not include a dedicated space in their plans.

This problem is somewhat common to all museums. (According to a UNESCO publication, one 1994 survey revealed that 90% of patrons didn't know museums had libraries.) As someone who has spent a lot of time in collections management, I can attest to the difficulty of maintaining and integrating a good collections management system as it takes a lot of effort and dedication. However, it seems to be worse in aviation museums because the aircraft tend to take the spotlight. (While I am not familiar enough with automotive and railway museums to say for certain, I imagine they suffer from the same problem.)

Furthermore, while many have a "library" it consists of only modern, mass produced publications. This type of library is good to have - there is nothing inherently wrong with it - but they lack the "archive" necessary for preserving historic collections. (It is worth noting that the line between archives and collections can be fuzzy and some museums choose to group them together.)

Therefore, I would like to spotlight some of these collections. For an institution to meet the criteria for inclusion of this list, it must have a dedicated library or archives page on its website and it must be a museum. The former requirement was selected to demonstrate a museum's dedication to it's library collection. (Some combine them with their collections or donations page.)

The most common bit of information on museum library pages is an approximate count of their holdings. Since size is often the only quantifiable and available form of comparison, it has been included here as a potential comparison of significance. A few caveats regarding these numbers: 1) they may be rounded, 2) they may only reflect cataloged items and not the entire collection, and 3) different organizations use different terms for their materials, so comparison may be somewhat apples to oranges.

Libraries (Institution - Name of Collection - Size)

• Air Force Museum of New Zealand - Reading Room - 3,500 volumes
• Alberta Aviation Museum - Archives & Research Library - 5,000 volumes; 200,000 digital images
• American Helicopter Museum & Education Center - Library and Archives - 18,000 items
• Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum - W.J. "Ernie" Schorr Memorial Library - 1,000 books; 220 videos
• British Columbia Aviation Museum - Library - 7,700 books; 670 videos; 30,000 digital images
• Canada Aviation and Space Museum - Library and Archives - Unknown
• EAA Aviation Museum - Library - 11,000 books; 100,000 images
• Empire State Aerosciences Museum - Janz Vander Veer Research Center/Library - 2,100 photographs
• Finnish Aviation Museum - Library and Archives - 16,000 monographs
• Flight Path Museum LAX - William A. Schoneberger Research Library - Unknown
• Frontiers of Flight Museum - Research Library - 35,000 records
• Greenwood Military Aviation Museum - Library - 1,700 books
• Hill Aerospace Museum - Major General Rex A. Hadley Research Library and Archives - Unknown (Closed to Public)
• Hiller Aviation Museum - Michael King Smith Research Library - 5,400 books and other works
• Historic Aviation Memorial Museum - Library - Unknown
• MAPS Air Museum - Louise Timken Library & Research Center - 7,900 items
• March Field Air Museum - Yeager Family Library - 7,000 volumes
• Military Aviation Museum - Library - 3,100 books
• Millville Army Air Field Museum - Henry E. Wyble Historic Research Library & Education Center - Unknown
• Museum of Flight - Harl V. Brackin Library - 36,000 books; 60,000 journal issues; 18,000 manuals; 6,850 technical reports
• National Air and Space Museum - Library - 40,000 volumes
• National Naval Aviation Museum - Emil Buehler Naval Aviation Library - Unknown (Reference)
• Newark Air Museum - Museum Archive - 5,100 books; 40,000 photographs
• Norwegian Aviation Museum - Library - Unknown
• Planes of Fame Air Museum - Research Library - 10,000 volumes
• Polish Aviation Museum - Library - Unknown
• Royal Air Force Museum - Archive & Library - Unknown
• San Diego Air & Space Museum - Library & Archives - 38,000 items
• Shearwater Aviation Museum - Library & Archives - 13,000 items
• Tangmere Military Aviation Museum - Peter Wright Memorial Library - 4,000 books/periodicals
• Travis Air Force Base Aviation Museum - Library Archives - 3,000 books (Reference)
• United States Army Aviation Museum - Research Library - 3,000 books
• USS Midway Museum - Library - 6,400 volumes; 1,400 cruise books; 1,500 technical manuals; 750 videos; 5,500 magazine issues (Reference)
• Western Museum of Flight - Dr. Ira E. Chart Research Library - Unknown
• Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum - Research Library - 15,000 books; 800 periodicals; 1,000 digitized images

Pure archives are listed separately in the section below:

Archives (Institution - Name of Collection - Size)

• Delta Flight Museum - Archives - Unknown
• Fleet Air Arm Museum - Centre for Naval Aviation Records & Research - Unknown
• Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum - Archival Collection - 200,000 photographs
• Kansas Aviation Museum - Research Archives - 10,000 books; 75,000 journals; 25,000 photographs (Reference)
• Museum of Flight - Archives - 5,000 cubic feet of items
• Piper Aviation Museum - Archives - Unknown
• Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada - Collections & Archives - 60,000 images

These entries don't quite fit the criteria for inclusion above, but are worth noting:

Honorable Mentions (Institution - Name of Collection - Size)

• Cradle of Aviation Museum - New York Heritage Digital Collections - Unknown
• Oregon Aviation Historical Society - Hedberg Aviation Resource Library - 230 books, 160 VHS tapes, 23 DVDs
• SFO Museum - Aviation Museum and Library - 8,600 volumes

EDIT (24-01-25): Added size to Hiller Aviation Museum entry.

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Tri-State Warbird Museum Collections Manager & Museum Attendant

Warbird Philosophy Webmaster

The Cavanaugh Flight Museum in Addison, TX has a nice lending library for Museum members. I don't know how many volumes it contains, but it includes an impressive mix of aviation titles covering the entire history of flight, technical/maintenance/military manuals, pilot training materials, coffee table books, and paperbacks.

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

Excellent post Noha!!!!

Thank you for the links.

Thanks for the information. I would have included it if it had a dedicated page, but unfortunately there is absolutely no mention of it anywhere on their website. So I didn't even know it exists. This is part of the reason I started this thread, as aviation museum libraries don't get the recognition they deserve.

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Tri-State Warbird Museum Collections Manager & Museum Attendant

Warbird Philosophy Webmaster

The film Catch 22 reminds me of our library. It is not mentioned on our site of Aviation Heritage Museum, Perth, W.A. and it's a blessing and a curse. We do not have a lending library, except for some secondhand books available for lending to volunteers. So we call it a Reference Library and not the Archive that would have stopped the why do we need a library from various people. A lending library allows precious books to have coffee, food, dogs chewed the book and I loaned it to a mate who did not give it back answers from the person who loaned the book and even a sudden passing of the borrower has its own headaches. You pull out the reference book for the budding new author, researcher or just nosey person and assign them to the desk that converts VHS tapes to DVDs and Oral tapes to the computer. Or the desk you use to photograph the Microfiche tapes. Or the desk that has the Digitiser of the books. Or maybe even the two desks that are used for donations to the library as there are no others. The request by email for research about a grandfather, one of tens of thousands who over the decades passed away or what's this aircraft, arrives on the same day that six cardboard boxes of books that are being donated to your museum from people that are downsizing their homes or from deceased estates. Your new donated book is far better than the one on the shelf but it does not have the author's signature so you keep both. Over the decades multiple publishers have produced the same non fiction book of different sizes, so again you keep the three books on that subject. All of this happens while the space you have on the shelves has run out long ago. So to combat the why do we need a library, you sell of the second hand books that are not needed, to promote revenue that always extinguishes any questions. Romance or old recipes books sell before picture books on aircraft, go figure. You also promote the Reference library by obtaining the oldest and smallest display cabinet in the museum to display second hand books about events that happened during the months of the year. Like the Battle of Britain, various other historic battles, pioneering historic events, or aircraft like our new Panavia Tornado GR.4. The vast mountain of seconds magazines are given away free to anyone who desires them and are swiftly gone. So over my dead body will we not have or need a Reference library in our museum, although after looking in the mirror that may not be long in coming. So remember us when you are watching Catch 22 as we always need to rectify something by doing something else and do not drool over your Wheaties or Toast while reading a book as you may donate it to a museum somewhere in the future. Oh by the way we have 10,693 Books, 1,211 Manuals, 31,461 Magazines, 741 Booklets, 804 DVDs, 63 Folders, 32 Bookzines, 22 Charts, 18 Plans/Cutaways and hundreds not yet recorded and 2 Thesis. plus quite a few scrapbooks of paper cut outs and vinyl records.

Sorry it should have been. Perth | RAAFA WA | Aviation Heritage Museum

Historic Wendover Airfield museum has a very small original base museum collection. How? Several years ago we were contacted by the Redstone Arsenal librarian who was getting rid of very old books. A number of them had "Wendover Army Air Base Post Library" stamped on the inside cover! She sent them "home" and we now have them in our small but sincere library! I will have to reach out to the curator and get him to send me some photos.

Tom P.

The National Warplane Museum at Geneseo, NY, has a considerable library. I'd donated a few surplus books to them some years back.
And the last time I was there, maybe in 2011, student volunteers from the nearby state university were cataloging and organizing the collections. That's a small place and their holdings may not be listed online, but their library does exist.

I wrote about our book library and the fact that maybe as in the case of our library other libraries around the world are facing a lack of knowledge or recognition from other volunteers concerning why they are on site in their museum. From a person that started volunteering in a library because it was air conditioned and due to volunteering in a 35 to 40 degree C heat in a display hangar it is no joke, I have progressed to loving my surroundings. The fact that I wrote down the wrong name of our museum on purpose in the Aviation Museum Libraries did not get any replies to state the obvious mistake and made me wonder as in the past on this forum if anybody really read or understood my rantings and ravings or cared. To see hundreds of people viewing your remarks and no replies is disconcerting and makes you wonder about the future of paper knowledge. But you then have the knowledge of other vintage items that have a loyal following like Vinyl pop records that even have new playing machines being made today to allow them to be played. The Ford Mustang, Corvette, MG, Supermarine Spitfire, North American Mustang all have their loyal followers so why not books and manuals. The memory stick, dongle and flash drive to give them a recognised name, gets its knowledge from a book via a Fujitsu digital machine in our case, that is easy to carry around but can become obsolete by technology, remember the floppy disk and can be overwritten by mistake as I have done. The book lives on and is a bit like the painting of the Mona Liza where there is a vast amount of re productions of her, but there is only one real Mona Liza picture that still gets a huge following to see her. The vintage books, unlike the modern books, do not keep referring to other books for knowledge and they cover one subject that was current at that time. The modern book keeps on inventing the wheel, how many books on the Spitfire, Mustang, Lancaster do we need, and why do they need to constantly recover information from other books to promote their own astounds me. without them we can allow shelves to be not so crowded and stop damage to other old books. It's a wise person that can predict the books or magazines that will get a following in the future like the past items. In the past Jane's reference aircraft books, reference books by Putnam and even the Observer book of aircraft that children could buy with pocket money, plus the Biggles books were and are the collectors item, other nations must have special books like those ones as well. These cover all ages and I am sure that an older generation wished they had kept those books bought or given as a Christmas present long ago. A magazine called Cross and Cockade about WW1 aircraft and dare I say the warbird magazine Classic Wings will be my bet, plus publications out of Poland as well.
Each book in our library has two letters of the alphabet, the first one is the subject and the second one a particular category, like CA is C for the people involved in the flying of an aircraft in flight or on the ground and A is Military Pilots. Then you go down the alphabet until you get to CZ which covers the few not in the other categories. Another is JB, J for aircraft constructors and manufacturers and B is American. Then again down the alphabet until JZ covers the obscure manufacturers that did one aircraft or countries that did not have a big industry. Each book/magazine or whatever is filed with its own number. Its location is then in the Australian Reference, World Reference, WW1 Reference, General, Technical, Magazines, etc. They are put on a vertical rack that has a letter of the alphabet and each horizontal shelf from top down is numbered so that you cannot lose the books unless somebody pulled one out and put it back in the wrong place or even rack as has happened. So you give each person a flat wooden paddle to place in the spot the book came out of. Back in some of my threads (April 2021) I thought we had one unique book about American Manufacturers in 1919, only to find that Noah307 knew sites that could supply a decade of these books thus opening up a site for followers of this forum. Maybe Aircraft Museum librarians could share more knowledge about their books and libraries, allowing us to not be isolated in our different locations, also because most of us may not have a librarian background but have knowledge concerning aircraft and real librarians usually don't, we need confirmation that we are on the right track. Though all our books are donated and we do not have a way of picking and choosing what we want, we always hope there is one book that will be unique out of forty books that are donated to us.

One day's donations

Information that can be supplied from museum libraries

That's awesome! I made a post a couple months ago with what I learned about the drive for base/company libraries during the war, but I never imagined that a portion of one could be recreated at it's original home!


Thanks for sharing this bit of detail. I've dealt with the exact same issues, so it's interesting to hear other people having the exact same problem.


I know exactly what you're talking about. The "aircraft encyclopedias" are the most egregious practitioners of this - sometimes being no more than repackaging of individual monographs from "aircraft profile book series" in a single volume. There are some exceptions to the rule, for example the TBM Avenger book in Schiffer's Legends of Warfare: Aviation series did a good job of including some previously unpublished photographs from the Grumman collection (which was featured in another thread), but the majority seem to be re-summarized and re-edited versions of existing information.

The good news is that there are still authors doing excellent historical research out there. (For instance, I just bought a copy of Daniel D. Whitney's Vee's for Victory! for our museum and it is a tour de force.) The problem is that the general public doesn't tend to go for the highly technical tomes that these individuals produce, and as a result, as you mentioned:

On that note, I'm curious, have you heard about the National Library of New Zealand's plans to deaccession their Overseas Published Collections? I know you're actually in Australia, but they posted a spreadsheet of the available books on their website and a portion are vintage aviation books that you might be interested in. Just search the list for the words "aircraft" or "aviation" and you should come up with a good number of results.


First, for anyone who missed it, the thread is: Vintage Aviation Books and Periodicals.

Second, it's worth mentioning that the only reason that most of those books are available in such a way is that they are public domain. There's a lot of other material that is not accessible online either still in copyright or the copyright is too difficult to easily determine. I say this because I don't want people to go thinking that physical libraries are obsolete or no longer needed. I completed a project to digitize and make available a collection of mostly wartime aviation magazines in the Tri-State Warbird Museum's collection, but it took a lot of effort, a grant, and a knowledge of a specific policy called "controlled digital lending" that allows for free public availability of in copyright publications to make it happen.

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Tri-State Warbird Museum Collections Manager & Museum Attendant

Warbird Philosophy Webmaster

Noha307. Thank you for answering to what I wrote concerning our library and the inner workings of it. Myself and other librarians reading this thread should build on it like your other one concerning Ground Support Equipment in Aviation Museums. We need another person just like yourself and Mark Allen M who does a magnificent job with historic photographs to champion the paper collection in Aircraft Museums around the world and I nominate you.

I also do keep a paperback along with a hardback copy of the same author and publisher as they usually differ quite a bit in years and always thought that the cheaper paperback for research handling would at least keep the hardback from damage. Another author that does good books is Dennis R. Jenkins. I accessioned a donation of his called the Space Shuttle today and found other books that he had a hand in located in our library, Valkyrie ( North American ) supersonic bomber, American X-vehicles, Experimental & Prototype U.S. Air Force Jet Fighters, plus 4 Warbird Tech Series and 1 Airliner Tech Series.

The Kagero publications from Poland that one volunteer supplies us with always have something different, compared to the western publications.

No, I had not heard about the deaccessioning of the Overseas published Collection at the National Library of New Zealand. Due to attacking the constant build up of items in the library and finishing one pile of books/manuals/magazines, I look over my shoulder to find another pyramid of these items looking back at me. Sorry to say I have not been looking at gaining items from other areas in the world, especially 3,276 miles away, But this is why your information is vital for the New Zealand librarians that would be on this forum. So thank you for this information, it helps others.

We need to communicate with other librarians so our collections strive to be the best that unpaid and time starved volunteers with a lonely wife back home, plus nil finances that they achieve with the time available (two days in my case) at their locations. An example of time wasted was our library was attacked by wellbeing volunteers internally over the years, with one thinking that U.S.A. was neat in explaining a short version of a country, that he would do the same for A.U.S. for Australia instead of AUS, not realising that one replaced multiple words and the other should only have referred to one. It took us three months of corrections on the computer to fix this mistake. Or the person that loved abbreviations so much that only she could understand them, even came up with an abbreviation for Azerbaijan not realising that the chances of aviation authors and publishers was about nil. Again months were wasted in rectifying this problem of abbreviating everything so that others could benefit from the written words in front of them. 

I have paid a brief visit to the library at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.
I'm sure I could spend months tgere, especially if you can access the collections of the later Pete Bowers.

While at Wright-Pat, I availed myself of the research library at the NMUSAF.
The late David Menard (you see his name in the "Thanks to" list of countless books) was always welcoming.
He dug out files on Don Gentile so I could authenticate a signed copy of his wartime autobiography.

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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.
Note political free signature.
I figure if you wanted my opinion on items unrelated to this forum, you'd ask for it.

I'm very honored. Thank you.

For what it's worth, I'd much rather be remembered as the book/library/archives guy than the the GSE guy. The latter is more a result of my obsession with listing things than an actual specific interest in GSE. (Although there's some of that too.)


I did send an email to the Air Force Museum of New Zealand about the situation, but I never heard back so I'm not sure if they received it. I would be thrilled if this thread did result in one of the kiwis being able to take the relevant aviation portion of the collection. Maybe DaveM2, ErrolC, or Zac Yates could mention it over on the Wings Over New Zealand forum like they did with the P-40 thread. According to a news article from January, the library is still looking for help with the collection.

To give a sense of scale for those who might be interested, of the 428,232 books in the collection 1,089 include either the words "aircraft", "airplane", or "aviation" in the title - over 200 of which date to before 1950. If anyone wants to check it out for themselves, you can download the list of books from the spreadsheet on the library's website and use Excel's filter function to search by those terms.


Regarding the subject of controlled vocabulary, the OCLC has an updated version of the Library of Congress Subject Headings called FAST that is free to use. It might help prevent the sort of situation you described from reoccurring. There's also a standard called Nomenclature that is also available online for free. Although it's designed to be used to describe objects and not books, it still might be worth a look just for ideas on how things are structured. Finally, while I don't have a lot of experience with it, from what I can tell, there's also a lot of movement in the cultural heritage sector towards using Wikidata.

I use a free citation management software called Zotero for our library catalog. It's not designed for that purpose, but it works pretty well for it. The export capability allows me to output all of the entries to either CSV or HTML format for reuse elsewhere. However, the reason I mention it is that it has a feature that, if you enter the ISBN number, it will not only populate the bibliographic information for the book, but also automatically add searchable subject tags to each entry. (For reference, Zotero is also what I use to create the the entries on the Vintage Aviation Books and Periodicals thread.) This is not necessarily to suggest that Zotero is the solution to your problem, but just that there are ways of speeding up the process while also somewhat reducing errors.

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Tri-State Warbird Museum Collections Manager & Museum Attendant

Warbird Philosophy Webmaster