Talking about finding a good home where long hoarded material can be donated this has been on my mind for a long time. I'd give my full set of ASDs tomorrow as long as continued access was possible. The drawback with digitalised copies is that are often inadequately indexed and lacking the detailed cross referencing that a researcher relies on. So for the time being there is no substitute to having the material open and laid out on a table or tables.
When you go on line and download back copies of FLIGHT and FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL it is a bugger of a job to sort and to follow logically a line of research. The quality of the scanning is also often not the best either.
Maybe that is part of the reason why single copies of FLIGHT or THE AEROPLANE from the twenties and thirties fetch anything from ten to twenty dollars.
The co-author of FLIGHTPAST Trevor Boughton would be a good man to hear on this. Trevor has been doing his own cutting service from all Australian periodicals and papers for fifty years or more. When I first visited his home in Mosman, Sydney in 1963 every room, every spare cubic foot of space was taken up with the archive. Not many know that he has for years edited and published his journal MAN AND AERIAL MACHINES (MAAM) from his home and pursued lines of research with a rigour not to be found elsewhere in any work done to preserve our aviation heritage, at least in respect to the written record.
Last edited by Fantome; 8th Dec 2012 at 05:21.