NEWS INDEX Archives 2004 July

Grant will save pages of railroad journals in U. of I. library

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@uiuc.edu

7/14/04

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As most librarians know, time has a way of destroying history. Age can yellow and stain the paper history is written on; it can dry it out and embrittle it; it can tear it, and ultimately reduce it to powder.

But thanks to a new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, thousands of endangered pages of American history dealing with railroads will be reclaimed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The university has received a grant of $77,000 to save thousands of brittle pages from two historic railroad journals, Railway Age and the American Railroad Journal. Both journals began publication in the mid-19th century; Railway Age is still in publication.

Tom Teper, the head of preservation at the U. of I. Library and project investigator for the preservation project, said that the fragile pages targeted for a new incarnation by means of microfilming come from issues published between 1832 and 1975. After 1975, the quality of paper used in these journals improved enough so that severe brittleness is not a huge problem with subsequent volumes.

The goal of the project is to produce complete runs of the periods covered on microfilm, making them available to researchers at Illinois and beyond through interlibrary loan.

The Library will borrow missing issues from other institutions and film them, “so that we’ll have the entire record of the publication,” Teper said.
The Library also will do some stabilization of journal pages that are weak and damaged, but “the film will become the preservation copy from this point on, a good-quality surrogate for the original that is predicted to remain accessible for 500 years.”

Both titles are “venerable trade journals,” Teper said, and both were aimed at business and financial readers – “investors and others who were interested in starting up or being part of the growing railroad system in America.”

Both journals also have gone through considerable renaming over the decades, so “while we’re only filming two serials,” Teper said, “we’re going to end up cataloging 24 titles.”

In terms of numbers, 119,622 pages will be filmed from the American Railroad Journal, while 142,000 will be filmed from Railway Age. The journals reside in the Library’s stacks and in the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center. U. of I. librarians William Mischo, engineering, and Tom Kilton, modern languages and linguistics, provided scholarly advice on the selection of titles for filming and contributed supporting materials for the grant application.

Illinois’ grant is part of a larger NEH grant awarded to four Midwestern universities that belong to the CIC, or Committee on Institutional Cooperation. The total grant of $393,000 will help the four schools preserve their important research materials dealing with U.S. railroads and their influence on American life, landscape, history and technology.

At Illinois, Annette Morris, the Library’s brittle books coordinator, will train graduate students to do the preparation work, including pulling and collating materials, ordering replacement pages through interlibrary loan, packing items for shipment, and upon return, doing a quality-control inspection. OCLC Digital Collection and Preservation Services in Bethlehem, Pa., will do the microfilming. The work should be done by October 2006.

Paging through the journals, one immediately discovers a difference: Earlier issues are weighed down with dense academic treatises, later issues with advertisements.

For example, the Nov. 1, 1840, issue of the American Railroad Journal, then titled Mechanics’ Magazine, includes an article on the “Adaptation of the Form of Furnace to the Kind of Fuel Consumed, Considered Particularly in Reference to Steam Engine Boilers.”

The May 7, 1870, issue of the Railroad Gazette, which later became Railway Age, on the other hand, was peppered with ads. The National Watch Co., which manufactured Elgin watches, was a major advertiser, and in this issue ran testimonials for its products. C.G. Hammond, the general superintendent of the Union Pacific Railroad, wrote:

“Dear Sir –– During the months that I have carried one of your B.W. Raymond Watches, it has not failed to keep the time with so much accuracy as to leave nothing to desire in this regard. For accuracy in time kept, beauty of movement and finish, your watch challenges my admiration and arouses my pride as an American, and I am confident that in all respects they will compete successfully in the markets of the world with similar manufactures of older nations. They need only to be known to be appreciated.”

The same issue ran ads for the Harrisburg Car Manufacturing Co., which produced “passenger, mail, baggage, box, gondola, coal and all other kinds of railroad cars”; for Rand, McNally & Co.’s Railroad Ticket Printing House; for telegraph machinery and supplies; lock nut washers; steam drills; railway car springs; and hot-water pipes from Baker, Smith and Co. of Chicago, for “warming railway carriages.”

However, an article in the next issue included an article on “Roadway Management – Its System of Advertising,” subtitled “How This World is Given to Lying.”

The U. of I. has a strong collection of railroad materials, Teper said. The William W. Hay Railroad Engineering Collection at the Engineering Library was donated in 2001 by the Transportation Technology Center Inc., a subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads, and the Federal Railroad Administration. Hay was a professor of railroad engineering at Illinois for more than 30 years and author of a classic text, “Railroad Engineering.”

The Grainger Library also is the designated repository for the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance of Way Association.

To this day, the U. of I. has a strong railroad-engineering program, part of its College of Engineering, which consistently is ranked among the top five in the nation.