National Museum of Transportation

The National Museum of Transportation will undertake a project to digitize approximately 25,000 original blueprints and engineering drawings produced by rail car manufacturers from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Over the course of this 24-month project, museum staff and consultants will: inventory and organize this collection; select approximately half of the blueprints and drawings in the collection based on importance and condition issues; and scan the items, creating a master copy, standard copy, and bitmap file. Once scanned, the files will be stored in a collections management database and will be easily accessible to staff, researchers, and the general public.