10 replies to this topic

[DCapps]

I am in the process of converting the scans I made of the material that Gordon White had microfilmed in the basement of the IMS Hall of Museum back in the 1980s into PDF files.

 

As usual, I will place them at this site (https://independent....du/HDonaldCapps) and also what I had done earlier on the Sanction Books here (https://corktreeresearch.org/) as a PDF download.

 

The first batch of scans from the Contest Board Sanction Books will be Sanctions No. 1 to 700, 1909 to into 1914. This also includes a few sanctions from the 1908.

 

These are pretty much raw, unedited scans, just as they were on the microfilm.

 

Given the size of the files, I am probably not going to be able to put them all on my Academia or Wordpress sites.

 

The next batch will cover Sanctions No. 701 to No. 1403, spanning 1914 to into 1923.

Edited by DCapps, 01 February 2018 - 16:53.

[DCapps]

Sanctions No. 701 to No. 1403 have now been put online. These cover events from the 1914 to the 1923 seasons.

[Michael Ferner]

Don, thanks for the effort. Much appreciated!!

[DCapps]

Sanctions 1404 to 2103 (1923 to 1928), 2104 to 2608 (1928 to 1931), and 1609 to 3408 (1931 to 1936) have now been placed on the Academia site.

 

All the sanction books material will also be placed on the RVM site.

 

In fact, I am beginning to nudge my limit on the Academia site so I will probably shift most of this work to the RVM site.

Edited by DCapps, 02 February 2018 - 18:45.

[Jim Thurman]

Don, let me also echo Michael in thanking you for doing this 

[DCapps]

At the RVM (https://corktreeresearch.org/), I have added the following: the sanctions from 3409 to 108R51, 1936 to 1951; reports for sanctions granted by the Contest Board for certification tests, which should help fill in a blank regarding Contest Board activities; and, the scrapbook of the 1905 meeting held at Ormond and Daytona Beaches.

 

More to follow, of course, but it will take some time to sort out most of what I have.

 

I really need to keep my space open at the Academia,edu site for other items, so as mentioned, most of this is heading towards the RVM site.

[Michael Ferner]

This really is gold dust, Don, thank you again for providing those scans! They allow for a close-up look at the hands-on details of administrating auto racing at all levels in the US, over a time span of very nearly half a century!! Unsurprisingly, given the techniques available at the time, and the peculiarities of auto racing itself and the Contest Board, of course, these documents are not going to be easily digestable, and finding answers (or even questions, for that matter!) will be hard work. But the insights one will be able to gain from studying this material should be worth the effort!

[DCapps]

And, of course, there are more gold nuggets where that came from....

[Jim Dillon]

Don your hard work is greatly appreciated. With all that is online these days and especially with more enthusiasts that are sharing "gold nuggets" the history of these days gone by may be a bit less cloudy. You have uploaded some pretty good info-thanks.

[DCapps]

Don your hard work is greatly appreciated. With all that is online these days and especially with more enthusiasts that are sharing "gold nuggets" the history of these days gone by may be a bit less cloudy. You have uploaded some pretty good info-thanks.

 

(1) Jim, Check your PM for a note from me.

 

(2) If at all possible, I plan to avoid what happened to the research material that John Glenn Printz, Ken McMaken, (Phil Harms to an extent) and too many others had gathered and which then vanished...

 

 

Postscript:

 

I only have seven reels of the microfilm that Gordon White had made, with those focusing exclusively on the International Sweepstakes race not among them. That said, I hope that the material does open a few doors and minds to the topic.

Edited by DCapps, 07 February 2018 - 15:15.

[DCapps]

One of the problems with the Atlantic Coast Old Timers Auto Racing Club microfilm of the documents found in the filing cabinets of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum, Gordon White was the club's historian and responsible for brokering the deal to get access to the archival material, is a serious one: contamination. Once you begin to survey and study the archival materials that were placed on microfilm, one quickly realizes that contemporary Contest Board documents are apparently mixed in with later material that was generated by Charles Betts (as in the Betts Brothers) and even, it seems, Phil Harms (!), not to mention the possible work of Arthur Means being tossed in as well. Given the rather chaotic and haphazard way the material appears on the microfilm reels, it is often difficult gain a good sense of just how the material is sorted and catalogued in the file cabinets. This does not even begin to address some of the other issues with the microfilm such as multiple copies of documents or the occasional very poor to simply terrible images of the material being recorded (something that the microfilm also shares with the Google Books effort).

 

I have suggested to the new director of the IMS archives that one of the first challenges he faces is the sorting out of this material, establishing Record Groups, of course, and by doing so separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. The chaff should be kept, but placed in its own separate RG's since they need to be preserved as well. I also mentioned that there are archivists and librarians at IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis) who earned the James J. Bradley Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Automotive Historians (which is presented to deserving archives and libraries for exemplary efforts in preserving motor vehicle resource materials) for their Digital Scholarship Program involving images from the IMS in 2017.

 

It has been one thing to eyeball the material using a microfilm reader, but having copies of the documents to handle, if you will, has been another thing entirely. I am seeing lots of things that I missed earlier.

 

I did not copy all the reels in their entirely thanks to various constraints, both time and technical, but I have enough of the "meat" of the several reels that I possess to wish that I had some of the other reels as well. As an aside, a large number of the other reels are records of the payout sheets for Midget and Sprint Car meetings, something that the members of the racing club were really more interested in than some of what gets my attention. And, of course, there were the (two) reels devoted to the IMS material.

 

More to follow...