In the 1930s, a lone switchman walks along the Illinois Central’s tracks near Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The First Regiment Armory appears in the background. John W. Barriger III Photo. John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, St. Louis Mercantile Library, UMSL.
Seen any good railroad photos lately?
Many of you have already been enjoying the latest offering from the Barriger Library, and this partially explains why it has been so long since I last posted here.
Since February 2013, the Barriger Library has been working on two major digitization programs. One was a joint project with the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society that involved digitizing their journal, Railroad History.
The second was a new Flickr account containing some of the library’s historic railroad photos. You can find them here.
The images, for the most part, are just copy negatives for the photos taken by John W. Barriger III. The scrapbooks were digitized separately on a large format book scanner. The two media types take up nearly 8 Terabytes of data storage space. It took nearly a year just to scan these images alone.
We were fortunate that three organizations donated funds to the Barriger Library to work on our digitization projects. The Norfolk Southern Foundation, the Union Pacific Foundation, and the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society all contributed funds that we used to help all of our digitization projects.
Most of these funds were used to purchase a large format book scanner and the hardware needed to support its operation. The remainder was used to pay for a student worker who spent many months working with the equipment digitizing these treasures.
Putting the scrapbooks online is going to take some time, but we decided that we needed to get the collection out into the wide world.
Our mission is to make this information available and having these scans on hard drives at the library wasn’t doing that. So, we set up a Flickr.com account and started uploading at the end of January 2014. As of February, 21, 2014, we’ve uploaded approximately 22,000 images from the collection.
We note that these are in some cases VERY rough. And we are going through all the images we’ve posted and correcting or replacing them. This is going to be a long-term project for us at the library, but we felt that it was better to have this out and fix it in full view of the world rather than to hide these lights under bushels.
Additionally, by posting them we are getting some great crowd-sourced captioning information.
If you look at the shots for the Missouri Southern, you’ll see a typical presentation of a single image with caption in the Barriger scrapbooks. Some are a bit sparse, particularly in terms of technical details and there are people who can fill these details in.
So, watch our Flickr page as we’re about ready to transition to the scrapbook pages from the negatives. The image uploads will slow down in quantity but improve in quality. Also we’d like to apologize for anyone who lost significant work productivity from January 30, 2014 onwards, because they were viewing the photos.
In the meantime, enjoy the images, and please add data if you can to any image caption. We appreciate the help!
Nick Fry is the curator of the John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library located on the campus of the University of Missouri, St. Louis in St. Louis.
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