Archive Drawing Access
The way I access drawings is to
send an email to an Archive Trustee describing what I'm looking for. The better information I can give, the better chance I have of finding what I want. Rootes used the same number for a drawing number that it assigned as the part number. So if I were interested in a drawing of a part I'd first go to the Tiger Parts Manual and find its number. I'd
include that number with my request. If they can find it, they usually will then email it to me if it was for my personal use. (Commercial purposes would require some additional discussion.) Most of the their scanned drawings are about 15mb.
It's my personal observation that the Archive scanning and digitizing program had to take a back seat to the much more pressing tasks of raising funds for the new building and then moving in. Scanning is now getting back on track but suffers from very limited manpower. Cataloging the scans is in it's infancy.
The archive has about two hundred thousand drawings on Aperture Cards (which are IBM punch cards with a 35mm B&W microfiche mounted on the card). So if someone requests a drawing of a widget from a Trustee, it's impossible to conceive that anyone will go through every card looking for that widget. (If it's even there to begin with.) Two Hundred thousand is an awfully big hay stack.
It's quicker to access a drawing that has been scanned but these, like the cards, are currently only filed by drawing number. Eventually these scans will be cataloged or indexed. But that task is in its earliest stages with only about a thousand (half a percent) suitably cataloged.
So to get around this, a number of us have traveled to the Archive to do our own research there. Some will be going over again in a few months. We will also be volunteering to help with scanning but the Trustees could certainly use a lot more help that just us. I estimate about 10% of the drawings have now been scanned and have mentioned only a half of a percent have been cataloged.
Once cataloging has been accomplished it should be much easier to locate drawings with electronic searches.
I have been working on a completely different method to access a small number of drawings by relating them to different parts of the vehicle. Tom Hall has been working along the same lines, essentially developing tags for drawings with those tags relating to parts of the car. We will continue that work in he UK in a few months.
You can find the email
contact information for the Trustees on the Archive's website at
https://www.rootesarchive.org/trustees/
good luck,
bt
at the beach