Motoring ephemera: Taking the wheel at the NYPL and the John Johnson Collection's Toyota Project

Taking the wheel (from the NewYork Public Library's Digital Gallery) with its 804 images, 'offers a sampling from the year 1909 of the Science, Industry and Business Library's (SIBL) extensive collection of manufacturers' catalogs and price lists'. The entire collection numbers c. 8,000 items and covers the first three decades of the 20th century.  Other forms of transport, dating back to the 17th century, are represented in the Library but have not been systematically digitised.

The context of these 1909 images can also be searched in Related subjects, from ambulances, through opera houses to working dogs.  I loved the view of the chauffeur-driven Lorraine Diétrich in front of the Paris Opera House.

(C) New York Public Library

The Toyota Project (1996) was the Bodleian Library's first digital project.  All motoring material was indexed and digitised, together with a further 1,000 images representing the other Transport sections of the Collection.  Every page of every catalogue was scanned, but OCR was then in its infancy and the results were poor and attempts to provide full-text searchability had to be abandoned.  Keyword searching has been applied to the data (only).

(C) Bodleian Libraries: John Johnson Collection

(C) Bodleian Libraries: John Johnson Collection

The 1244 items, (570 Motoring ephemera, the rest other forms of transport) can be seen as thumbnails and medium and large images.