http://www.vintageliterature.ca/cat_railroading.cfm

DVDs of old Railroad Publications, Manuals, Cyclopedias, etc.

This could be either an extreme opportunity for a library, or an extreme in frustration.

It APPEARS that with the order of a select few DVDs from this producer we could clear off several dozen reinforced shelf-feet at our library of heavy, fragile books.

BUT if the quality of reproduction is typical of, say, microfilms of 25 years ago, no way.

Can anyone here attest to the quality of the scanning work, whether the contents are searchable (for specific words, for example), and/or the quality of the DVD production? Of course, the intelligent archivist will take the contents and save them to a solid-state external hard drive to pre-empt probable eventual DVD-R deterioration.

How much of this is freely downloadable material that someone has just compiled onto DVDs? Or did they actually scan the books themselves. I have seen in other hobbies where unscrupulous individuals raid the internet for anything they can find. Then burn it to a DVD and sell it on ePay much to the dismay of the people who actually took the time to scan from their private collection and upload to the internet for all to use for free.

Since they seem to be charging $5-$6 per DVD, I don't think they are getting
rich.

-Hudson

For five bucks for three HK Porter catalogs, how can you go wrong?

Some of these titles seem familiar - like reprints done years ago on paper, which themselves may be hard to find now. Reproductions of reprints aren't without value. If anybody gets any of these and can vouch for the quality of the product, I'd be interested in filling some gaps in my library.

If they don't include the images.

No kidding. I looked up some of the cited books offered on DVD at archive.org, and they're there, minus imagery in some cases. You may not need pictures for a Moody's or Poor's, but for a travel guide to the PRR or B&O, that may be a different matter.......

I do have the Porter CD that I bought on ebay a while back, and it consists of scans of the three catalogs, so it includes the photos.

I have their DVD of the 1946 Car Builder's Cyclopedia. I bought it because my paper version is getting very crunchy, and isn't long for this world.

This particular effort is just graphics scans of every page, in either JPG or TIFF format, I forget which. So yes, all the illustrations and photos are there. The text is also a graphic, so is not searchable (because it isn't text.) Compared to the earlier Car Builder's Cyc.s offered by Rail Driver, the VLR effort is downright clunky; each page is a separate file, and there is no way to easily page through them. Yes, the material is there, but not very usable.

However, I bought it because no one else is offering anything post 1922; Google books and all the internet archives are all backed up behind the "mouse law" that has extended copyrights for a gazillion years. Surprisingly there is no assignment of copyright language in the volume I purchased... I suspect, since I believe the vendor is in Canada, he is just ignoring US copyright law, and that may well be the source of the bulk of his sales, as I seem to recall that Google books and many of the on-line archives are not available to viewers outside the US.

ON EDIT:
Should have looked before I posted... It's the Rail Driver "electronic" Car & Loco Cyc's that are a collection of JPGs, with a custom front end for viewing. The VLR Cyc is two HUGE PDF files, they are scroll-able, and one can use the Adobe Reader page number function to jump to a selected page. Scan resolution is adequate to see the half tone screen in the original, so quality is as good as it is going to get. I wish there was a touch more contrast, but that's just me.