Each form of media has its advantages and disadvantages.
I am thankful that I am living in the age where both still exist. We have the advantage of being able to access books and magazines that would otherwise be inaccessible or difficult to view….
I have tried to find Railway Age, Railroad Car Journal, etc.. in libraries and when I do find them (for example in Northwestern University’s “Transportation Library”) discover volumes that have not had the benefit of a librarian’s attention for many decades that are in a musty corner of a basement in vandalized and deteriorated condition. The online digital versions, while sometimes incomplete in a volume series and occasionally lacking fold-out drawings, maps, etc.., allow me to see a wide range of content without travelling (I’ve gone to the RR Museum of PA, the Philadelphia Public Library, Newberry Library, Illinois State Library, Library of Congress, and other far-flung library and other institutions looking for old volumes) from the comfort of my own home computer, and more recently, my iPhone from wherever I happen to be. Some volumes are digitized but only available for download page by page without academic affiliation.
…..that being said, reading on a screen (especially on the iPhone) is not the same experience as reading a book. In some cases it is better, especially in the initial stages of research, as most of the scanned material is full-text word searchable which can streamline looking for a particular item. Rupert has found even more CB&Q goodies using search tools than I have. Doing a manual scan of bound railroad journals to find items of interest is an entirely different process and is even more time-consuming. I doubt that I was able to get through a decade of Railway Age manually, and at the end of the day I was really tired from hefting the volumes, trying to decide which pages to copy, maneuvering them on the copier, etc… Now it is a matter of navigating a few word recognition gates and downloading pdfs for future study. A downside is that the downloaded versions seem to lack some of the full search features of the online version.
While I like having digital versions of sources in my library I am not sure of their long-term viability vs. Model Railroader’s digital version is scanned at a relatively low resolution making it useless to attempt to print out plans at their original scale. But, it allowed me not to have to fill in my missing volumes prior to 1945. I would like to acquire a digital set of Railroad Model Craftsman as earlier issues are even harder to obtain than Model Railroader and the digital copies would certainly suffice for my needs. Ditto the online versions of other magazines (but they are often restricted to page-at-a-time downloading which is pretty tedious.
I am glad that many titles of interest are being digitized as the trend in libraries today is to get rid of print versions of anything if it does not have the circulation history of a recent release movie DVD. Hopefully digitization and out-of-copyright will keep ahead of the dumpster so that copies of books and magazines will still exist for digitizing.
We will soon see the day when print media (newspapers, magazines and books) will not exist as today’s generation won’t even look at a hard copy anymore (based on my wife’s first-hand experience as a reference librarian (now retired). They don’t care if the information is correct or not, just that it be in digital format. She says that “they don’t know what they don’t know and don’t want to”.
But that is a whole other subject…..
Charlie Vlk