“Should be in a Museum”|Page 4|General Discussions & Questions|Forum|Winchester Collector

mrcvs said

Some auction sites already produce that which you seek.  Questions and comments can be posted as a thread to this forum, for a critique, plus comments and questions.  With one caveat.  Auction houses exist to sell products.  Sometimes what they write is hyperbole, lies, or fiction.  Which is why posting here for commentary can sort fact from fiction. 

Not that I don’t think a virtual site isn’t a good idea.  But it would be a lot of effort.

Hi Ian-

I too am glad that RIA makes their back catalogs available to search on-line, and the fact that Pat Hogan was a commercial photographer before opening his own auction house really helps.  Their Premier catalogs are as good as anything in the business…

Here’s my thing… Suppose I want to learn about 1873 Winchesters, I’m not a WACA member, and I haven’t yet “invested” in the right books.  Either because I don’t know what they are or because they are prohibitively expensive for a newbie still trying to decide if collecting M1873s is something I want to do…  What do I do???  I COULD search RIA catalogs, one auction at a time, and read their descriptions…  Believe me, for the pre-64 M70 I’ve done just that (good AND bad) for the past decade…  But will I come away from that exercise with an organized/structured understanding of M1873 basics?  My sense is that I would not…  If I already had that basic understanding, I might be able to read/interpret RIA catalogs better, but I don’t think I can learn (the bare bones basics of) what I need to know there…

I was thinking along the lines of an improved/expanded “Winchester Model Information” section under the “Resources” tab of this website.  Not a giveaway of the level of detail afforded by specialty books, but more easily accessed (and comprehended) than a random search of RIA catalogs…  Or (God help us!!!) GB/GI…

Why are so many badly done fake pre-64 M70s selling for $15-25K these days???  Because people don’t know what they’re supposed to look like…  Sure Clarence… Maybe they’re all just rich fools who don’t care and “deserve” to be fleeced… Or maybe simply they don’t have access to unbiased information… Roger’s M70 book (good as it is) is of little help in this regard…  Justin Hale (pre-64win.com) has done more recently (on their Facebook page and this Forum) to illustrate the pitfalls of M70 collecting than anyone since Vicvanb wrote his “How to Buy a Fake M70 Winchester” article in the Collector over a decade ago…

IMHO a “virtual museum” might (???) be a way of drawing more people into the hobby.  Or it might not…  We all bemoan the fact that Winchester collectors are dying out, but what are any of us (except Mark Douglas) doing about it???  The cost to WACA would be minimal (I think) involving only the cost of hosting more data on the site, but the investment of time would be substantial (meaning folks would have to want to do it)…  I still think that the general lack of photography skills amongst accomplished gun collectors would be the biggest barrier…

Nonetheless, I understand the pushback… The membership thinks it’s folly…  I can respect that and suspect that it is!!!

But if I get “motivated” I might do something like this for the pre-64 M70 outside of the WACA umbrella (just as a “prototype”).  I don’t know anything about website creation/design but (2) of my (3) sons are software designers whose jobs entail stuff much more complicated than website design/maintenance, and (for a small fee) I might be able to impose upon one of them…   WACA is GREAT!!!  But it’s not everything…

Best,

Lou

I mostly worry about information succession planning. I watch all the time as people pass away, retre, leave a job, etc. and their electronic information becomes inaccessible or rots away never to be seen again. On another thread we were pondering how George Madis’ papers and life’s work is probably sitting in a basement and no one’s heard from the family or has access….how did we let this happen?

I sincerely hope all of the experts here and folks with massive research databases and cataloguing of rifle photos have done some succession planning and made their electronic files and repositories retrievable in the event something happens. 

Backing up all this data and keeping off site copies is just as important. I know why some of this can’t be public, someone would just steal it, charge for it and ruin it for everyone all over again, but we have to make sure these things are shareable when needed. 

Hi Jeremy-

Good point!!!  While not as extensive as Bert or Jeff’s, my files, including the survey(s), my collection “photo project” (and all the images I’ve downloaded/saved), book files, etc. are backed up in a couple places and I have shared a version of the merged survey with a couple WACA members.  So at least everything won’t “go up in a cloud of smoke” when this hard drive fries itself…

I do not plan to put the actual survey (the spreadsheet with 20+ detail columns) in a publicly accessible place, e.g. website, as I’m concerned people would try to use it as a “serial number lookup” (akin to factory records – which they aren’t).  Too much potential controversy when someone finds that a “common” gun has “morphed” into a “rare/valuable” one.  Believe me… It happens… All too often… I think the survey is a great resource for summative analysis of production trends, but it’s NOT a factory ledger… 

OTOH…  [I seem to be just full of lame ideas lately… ]  If WACA wanted to create a secure central repository (database), where people doing scholarly work could be granted access, I’d happily put my files there and update them periodically. Like examining documents in the McCracken Library collection… “Winchester Historian” Bert Hartman could be the archive’s curator, deciding who gets access!!!  He doesn’t have enough to do, right???

Lou

Jeremy P said
I mostly worry about information succession planning. I watch all the time as people pass away, retre, leave a job, etc. and their electronic information becomes inaccessible or rots away never to be seen again. On another thread we were pondering how George Madis’ papers and life’s work is probably sitting in a basement and no one’s heard from the family or has access….how did we let this happen?

I sincerely hope all of the experts here and folks with massive research databases and cataloguing of rifle photos have done some succession planning and made their electronic files and repositories retrievable in the event something happens. 

Backing up all this data and keeping off site copies is just as important. I know why some of this can’t be public, someone would just steal it, charge for it and ruin it for everyone all over again, but we have to make sure these things are shareable when needed. 

  

Lots of irreplaceable knowledge has been lost for the ages

Clearly you guys are only counting your alpha-numeric data files, e.g. Excel and Word…  What about the images you’ve captured???  JWA alone must have a ton of them – not counting external downloaded/saved files???  And source document scans, like blueprints…  I save my photos (the ones I take) as raw .tiff files (>100 MB each and I don’t even have the newest/fanciest digital SLR).  My “processed” high-res .jpegs are still >10 MB…  To post here I have to downsize everything…

HOLY COW!!!  If you guys tossed those files in you’d each be in multi-terabyte territory!!!  WACA needs to buy a bigger server… Or as Roy Scheider said in the movie “Jaws”… “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”…