In the spirit of ORCA I would like to share the following Production information about the original Hardy Zane Grey Big Game Reels
In 1987 I contacted Hardy Brothers about production of HARDY ZANE GREY BIG GAME REELS.
I received a very nice reply from James L Hardy, included was company info on Hardy's relationship with Zane Grey and a hand written spreadsheet with reel production of the Zane Grey reels. The information included, size of reel and number produced each year.
Total Production of the Zane Grey Reels, 213 reels from 1928-1939, Made in 7 sizes.. see the attached photo of a spreadsheet I created from hardy records.. Please feel free to email me if you would like a PDF copy.
In a very short time the ORCA library will have the 1983 Hardy catalog for the reproduction of the Hardy Big Game Zane Grey reels done by House of Hardy itself. The first six pages of the catalog has a very interesting history of the Hardy Zane Grey reel you are talking about. The rest of the catalog describes in text, pictures and beautiful production drawings the Zane Grey Hardy reels made in the 1980's made by the House of Hardy.
I was so impressed with that catalog that I had the catalog resized and copied in my local print shop in color and donated the copy to the ORCA library. Now the challenge is going to be for Don to provide it to whom ever may want it in the same color copy.
The only way I have to copy it in color is go to my local print shop and have it copied - at about $1.00 for each page. Expensive but a nice catalog in color.
Since most reel catalogs were printed in color for the past 100 years it might be a plan for ORCA to consider buying Don a good scanner and when someone wants a color catalog it could be scanned into a digital file which could be sent to the requesting member. That person could then print it on his home computer. The Harvey Garrison Library could then gradually build up all these scanned files into a digital library. Charge for the scanning, but there would be no shipping costs.
When I was preparing to send a donation to Harvey a while back, I asked him if he wanted a scanned digital version. At the time we didn't put much thought into it and it was sort of put aside. I would think that one day all of these documents would be digital, like the NFLCC's library, but stored in a secured, password protected archive for downloading by ORCA members.
For those who are members of the NFLCC they are already moving towards a digital library available to NFLCC members. They have a really nice scan of an 1897 Pflueger catalog, for example, up on their site right now. I don't know if they are even taking hard copy donations any more.
I would think this is the wave of the future, but of course it would require huge amounts of time to scan all the existing files. The NFLCC digital library is an unbelievable resource at $100 for 25,000 pages of catalogs. They farmed out the work to an outside source to do the scanning. Don't recall the cost but it wasn't cheap.
I bet more than half of the ORCA membership would purchase a similar package of reel catalogs...
NFLCC did it the expensive way. It seems to me the simple way is to just scan the catalogs as someone wants a color copy, then send them the files in PDF (or whatever is the best method) format and they don't need a reader or anything else, other than a printer. President Jim would certainly know the easy way to do this. It pays for itself as you go. ORCA doesn't have hundreds of thousands in the bank to use.
Incidentally, ORCA has all the NFLCC catalog copies and they can be purchased one at a time from Harvey's Library. When he was NFLCC President Doc Herr made sure that ORCA had those CDs.
Phil - and everyone else - I don't need a scanner as i already have a nice HP Scanjet 5300C. My problem is since I upgraded my software from ME 2000 to Windows XP my Adobe Photo no longer works. It was part of the package for my original software and some link was lost in upgrading. I think at this stage it will be less hassel for me to buy new software as it takes me 2 to 3 days to delete everything from the computer and re-enter it. And there are still no assurances it would work then.
I will warn everyone that hard copies are the way to go in the long run. There will come a day when CD's and discs will no longer work. Magnetic records have no history to back them up and paper does. Remember the old floppies, reel to reel tape, eight track tape, 45, 33 1/3 and 78 rpm records, etc. Even if you have this stuff where are you going to get the equiptment and software to operate it? Actual paper has several hundred years of history. Even now video cassettes are on the way out.
The library does have the NFLCC's Digital Library - but darned if I can open it. We also have some CD's that I can't open, probably set up with software for a Mac.
And what about all the members (and there are many) who don't have a computer, have dial-up that can't handle much info at one time, or computers without much memory. Once I get my software straightened out I can offer some scanned copies, but there will always be a need for hard copies. THINK AHEAD!
Don, you misunderstand my suggestion. What I am suggesting is a way for you to send color copies to members. They print them on their printer. They can save them anyway they want. I completely agree that the Garrison Library would want to save hard copies. However, you can also save the file in case someone else wants a color copy and then you don't have to rescan the catalog.
