Auto Archives Land in Safe Havens: The Revs Program at Stanford University

From The NY Times:

The Revs Program at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., has been at the vanguard of the new movement to create an accessible repository of automotive history. The program describes itself as “a new trans-disciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile. The program aims to put the automobile at the center of the university and raise the quality of academic discourse at Stanford and beyond.”
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This week, the Revs Program will announce that Hearst Publishing is transferring the archives of Road & Track magazine to the Revs Program. Road & Track, which dates back to 1947, was perhaps the most influential American automotive publication after World War II. It is considered the first to have taken a mature — almost New Yorker-like — approach to automotive journalism, said Reilly P. Brennan, the executive director of the Revs Program. He said that the magazine at the time used high-quality photography and first-rate writers who might have worked in any field, but chose to write about cars.
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The goal, he said, will be to digitize, preserve and make available to the public on the Internet a collection rich with items much more diverse than a stack of back issues. In addition to photographs and hand-drawn graphs (and even gas receipts from road tests), gems like a dinner receipt from an editors’ dinner with Enzo Ferrari are preserved. (Il Commendatore apparently didn’t pick up the check.

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