Leonard thrust his thin, wiry hand into the rusty cabinet drawer and pulled out an old brown, rather dog-eared folder containing a thick wad of letters and newspaper clippings. “I’ve found it!” he exclaimed at the top of his voice to no-one in particular, causing his thick-rimmed coke-bottle glasses to slide a little further down his nose. Leonard could hardly contain his excitement as he sat down on a pile of boxes and set the tatty folder carefully on a wooden chest marked ‘Engineering Papers’, and began pouring through his latest find.
In some ways our Leonard’s commitment may illustrate the determination of many researchers in their efforts to find that one elusive piece of information. Researching the subject of either a magazine feature or a book is a lonely profession, and sometimes massively frustrating, so when you locate a rich vein of information you tend to milk it for all that its worth. That’s natural, but so too does everybody else who comes across the same source of information.
Over the last year or so, a group of committed friends have helped us to relocate the massive resources of Anne Hope’s Motor Industry Archives containing material dating as far back as the 1890s, to a temporary home in West Wales. Comprising some 75 filing cabinets and a couple of hundred packing boxes, this material needs to be brought into the 21st century, but there is much to be done to index and resort the material before we can get our hands on some the nuggets that lie within this rich resource.
Currently, none of this info is accessible even to ourselves, as the cabinets stand drawer-to-drawer in an empty hall in the next village, where we have been given permission to store the archive in the short-term. The next step, however, is to find or build a suitable building, where this material can be stored for access by interested parties such as publishers, editors, journalists, authors, university students, school groups, etc. Fortunately the Carmarthenshire County Council have seen the advantage of having such an important resource on their patch, and we are currently exploring ways of forming a trust that would ensure the preservation and growth of this important collection.
To date this process has taken the best part of a year, but we can report positive progress, which is encouraging. Funding for a project of this size is important in order to finance not only the building, but also the operating costs such as staff, equipment and storage of the material. As an author, I can identify with Leonard’s delight when he found his nugget of missing information, and this is the rewarding part of researching and writing. It is massively frustrating when you have been trying for hours to find or confirm a small detail in a photo caption for instance, or to research the workings of the Wankel engine for a university project, but without a rich resource such as this archive we wouldn’t be able to conduct any research at all. So it is our express desire and firm goal to see this project through, so if you have any advice, relevant contacts or other suggestions that could help this to happen, please let us know.
Of course the images in our photo archive, Virtual Motorpix, will benefit tremendously from being complemented by such a huge information base to help with captions or general author support. We will keep you posted as to our progress over the next few months. Hopefully we will have many ‘Leonard’ moments in the future.
(And by the way, any reference to real people is purely coincidental).
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