Thursday, April 7, 2016

The Legend - GT-4 Mugen CRX Race Car



Here are some incredible images I found of the original GT-4 Mugen CRX from 1985, tearing up Road Atlanta in Braselton, GA.  Keep reading to find out where I found these images, you'll want to know about it... trust me.












Normally I share images that I find on the internet on the GENONE Blog Facebook page, but this find was different.  I was doing research for an up-coming post and I stumbled upon a website that is essentially a massive archive of automotive images.  It is, quite literally, a gold mine.  You could spend countless hours just going through the vast amount of images they have available.  The site was created in conjunction with the Libraries of Stanford University, and is called the Revs Digital Library.  Here is their description of how this came about and what their goals are:

Stanford University - Revs Digital Library

The Revs Institute has a large and varied collection of automotive materials, including images, research books, ephemera, and specialized documents.  The Revs Program at Sanford University is producing research data and generating course materials.  The primary goal of Stanford Libraries is to ensure these materials are indexed, preserved and made available to library patrons, researchers and the general public.  By digitizing materials and making them discoverable, content that was once available to a select few becomes useful and discoverable for a wide range of researchers.

Working with Pixel Acuity, the Revs Institute for Automotive Research Inc. is digitizing their collection of images using specialized digital cameras.  Each slide, negative or print is cleaned and imaged at high resolution.  The images and associated metadata are collected and transferred to Stanford, where they are being accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR).

The Stanford Digital Repository ensures each digital object is preserved, made available via a permanent persistent URL (web address), enforces content rights and restrictions and provides a common storage mechanism for other applications to build upon.  Research and course material from the Revs Program at Stanford will also be stored in SDR, and all materials will be discoverable via the Stanford Libraries' online catalog, SearchWorks.

The Rev's Digital Library is built on top of the Stanford Digital Repository to provide a web based platform for discovery of automotive research and images.  The Digital Library is developed in Ruby on Rails using open source technologies, including Blacklight, Hydra, and Fedora Commons and will allow for metadata editing, provide community features, and tools for researchers to further untilize the data.

The Revs Digital Library currently contains 396,541 items from 33 collections.

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.  It is really special to know that automotive culture is going to be preserved forever.  Good luck being productive at work anymore! :)

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