Stock Car Racing 2010
Random Lugnuts
Green Cars, Blue Skies
Dee-Cee Enterprises
Auto Racing Shop
Automotive Shop
Luckybug Scrapbooking
Luckybug Creations
Forex Fortunes News
Stock Car Racing 2010
Random Lugnuts
Green Cars, Blue Skies
Dee-Cee Enterprises
Auto Racing Shop
Automotive Shop
Luckybug Scrapbooking
Luckybug Creations
Forex Fortunes News
The Crittenden Automotive Library - Contact Us
The contact person for CarsAndRacingStuff.com/The Crittenden Automotive Library is Bill Crittenden.
E-mail: admin@carsandracingstuff.com
Telephone: (815)354-7102
Yahoo! Messenger: luckybugweb
You can also contact Bill Crittenden through the following social networking sites:
Facebook: Bill Crittenden
MySpace: The Crittenden Automotive Library
As written by CarsAndRacingStuff.com/The Crittenden Automotive Library owner Bill Crittenden...
About Us? There's not much of an "us" to speak of. However, most organizations with this sort of page seem to refer to it as an "About Us" page. And if I said the page was "About Me" you'd expect it to be about, well, me (and not about this Library).
My name is Bill Crittenden. A 1999 graduate of Universal Technical Institute (Automotive Technology) and 2007/2010 Newsletter Editor of IPMS/C.A.R.S. in Miniature, I am the sole operator of The Crittenden Automotive Library and CarsAndRacingStuff.com. I organize & compile the Library information, publish it and maintain the functionality of the website. This website is not my "day job," right now I barely make enough money from it to pay the web hosting fees. I'm a security officer during the day, as I have been for the last 10 years. Currently I specialize in records administration and reporting. My occupation helps me develop computer skills that have made administering the Library easier (the backup system for the Library files is based on one I developed for my office) and the skills learned in creating the Library have helped me on the job (I learned to use The GIMP to edit photographs for the website, now I've used it at work to edit the graphics for access card designs).
There are others, however, who don't have an official position with the Library but whose support has been very important:
First of all is Heidi Walczak, my wife (we married in September 2002) and a photographic contributor to the Library. Just a month younger than me, formerly a real estate agent, office manager, she's currently a CNA. Her first car was a Chevrolet Chevette woody, and since then she's owned an early production first-year Chrysler PT Cruiser. One of her dream cars is a 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle, one of which was supposed to be her first car until it was damaged in a flood. In her spare time she scrapbooks under the name Luckybug Creations.
Before we had a digital camera (and before CarsAndRacingStuff.com was even created), when trial and error would have cost us film and developing fees, Heidi was the one carrying the camera. Her photography includes the first two Winston Cup races at Chicagoland Speedway and some of our trips to the Chicago Auto Show.
Tolerant and supportive of my "hobby" she has allowed me to turn a corner of the basement into an office packed with computer equipment and little Hot Wheels cars. Not to mention a model car building desk, the storage racks for hundreds of old car magazines, a display case filled with NASCAR die cast, several file cabinets of car brochures and newspaper clippings, a bookshelf filled with old grease-smudged manuals for cars I never even drove, and all that decades-old paper that gives the basement that certain musty smell that newer construction homes (such as our 2005 duplex) usually take much longer to develop. And now I've put a desk up in the living room so that I can spend even more time working. I thank her for her patience and tolerance of my obsessive love of cars.
Her father, John Walczak, is a valuable source of information and photographs for the site. Now a retired mortgage banker, he is also a former short track stock car driver, he's been in the model car decal business and held offices for various model car organizations over the years. Currently he's the 2010 President of IPMS/C.A.R.S. in Miniature.
Having been born in 1980, I can only read about the old days of muscle cars and stock car racing. As such he's become the Library's most important advisor and a living price guide at swap meets. Some of the most valuable advice is of which cars make good photographic subjects and thanks to him I have photographs of rare subjects in the Library that I wouldn't have thought to have taken pictures of at the time. As far as photography goes, to say his geographic region overlaps my own would be an understatement (most often we go to the same shows and you can see it in the Library when we both take pictures of the same car), however his photographic collection goes much farther back than my own and even now he attends events that I am unable to due to my work schedule.
The Crittenden Automotive Library - History
CarsAndRacingStuff.com was started December 12, 2005, with the intention of being an online store for automotive collectibles: die cast cars from NASCAR Action cars to classic Hot Wheels, racing cards, and more. The name itself was chosen because Cars And Racing Stuff is an acronym for CARS. The website was a blue background with yellow outlines around white text boxes, the colors having been chosen by a person who had been in the model car business for decades and was to be the store owner. Titles on the tops of the pages were in a chrome-effect lettering made to look like classic American car badges.
The site went online without the store, and in the meantime I began compiling a Vehicle List, a list of all car model names used and who used them. It was just a fun little resource that became the spark for the entire Crittenden Automotive Library.
From there I moved to creating a guidebook for all the model car kits and die cast, racing cards & other collectibles I could find and compile into a Model Kit & Collectibles Guide. It seemed like a good way to draw new customers to the site and advertise the store to them.
Then an effort was made to give the Guide searching and sorting functions, and it was converted into the Model Kits and Collectibles Database. The MKCD was a PHP-accessed MySQL database of all types of collectible cars and cards. It was actually building quite well, but other changes would need to be made...
While the MKCD was being compiled, I thought I'd write a few articles about collectible cars and models. An articles section sprang up on the site. Then I posted some photographs from the Chicago Auto Show in a newly created Photos section.
So I had the MKCD, Vehicle List, Articles and Photos. I thought it would be convenient if all the information were on one page, so that when someone clicked the link to, say, Chevrolet, that all the Chevrolet model kits, photos of Chevrolets, the list of cars and trucks Chevrolet produced, and a list of articles about Chevrolets would all appear on the same page.
The site was a couple months old, and by that time it was realized that the store wasn't going to ever go online, not with the convenience and audience that selling on eBay brings. I decided to refocus the site entirely on the information it contained. I dropped the database function, but kept some of the more convenient PHP features I learned in creating it and created the Cars And Racing Stuff Encyclopedia in February of 2006. The blue of the website was changed to a dark blue, and the yellow trim on was changed to a dark orange. I thought an information resource, if it was meant to be taken seriously, shouldn't have such bright colors. The chrome titles remained, though.
Eventually, however, I realized that "Encyclopedia" was not an appropriate name for the compilation of information I was creating. For one, it had very detailed information on some very obscure topics without even mentioning some very important ones. So it didn't have that "background information on every topic of importance" feel of a true encyclopedia. I also wanted to fully integrate the Articles section and other types of media that just weren't part of a traditional Encyclopedia.
A lot of thought went into the name. It should be unique and not easily confused with other information resources. Despite containing information about motorcycles and trucks, the word Automotive was chosen because the majority of the information is about cars and because "road transportation" sounds like a name a government agency or think-tank would use. My last name, Crittenden, was added to it simply because it was the easiest way to distinguish my resource from others with similar names. Finally, the name Library was chosen because of the wide range of types of information available. Libraries are traditionally associated with collections of books, but a modern library also includes photographic collections, databases, newspapers and other media. A modern library is more a collection of information than a collection of books, and so it seemed the most appropriate name for the collection of information I was putting together.
On September 5, 2006, The Crittenden Automotive Library was officially launched. The colors of the site changed as well, to dark green with dark blue trim. Since then the white-with-green-stripe design was created, and then the green wheel logo and finally the dark blue was changed to dark purple. The dark green has been a favorite color of mine since I was young, and from the standpoint of automotive history it is a favorite of mine as it reminds me of British racing green (and Crittenden is an English name, from the Kent/Medford area east of London).
The Crittenden Automotive Library - Organization
The Crittenden Automotive Library is indexed in the way it is, with topic pages found by clicking links from lists rather than running a search and information coded directly onto the pages instead of being pulled from a database because I actually wanted to bring a human touch back to finding information online. Originally, before search engines automatically swept the internet for every available website and compiled what they found into massive searchable databases, human-created and human-managed directories were the way to find your way online. While search brings nearly the entire internet to your fingertips in less than a second's time, it also sometimes brings you parts of the internet that you weren't looking for. A search for a Packard Executive usually results in a list of websites about the executive management of the HP (Hewlett-Packard) computer company. Searching Flickr by image tag is also unreliable, as it depends upon what tags are entered by the used. Don't get me wrong, searches are very useful and definitely have their place in the online world (a Google-based site search feature is available for the entire CarsAndRacingStuff.com domain), however I feel that by organizing the information myself onto each page in an order that I hope makes sense to a user rather than organizing it by how a program decides what is most popular or "relevant" to the search term actually helps users find what they are looking for.
A human-created organizational structure where everything has a specific place results in being able to find information much more quickly, or in many cases helps confirm that a certain piece of information is not available at the library, but it's very time consuming to create and maintain. Which is why search engines were created in the first place. The Crittenden Automotive Library, as such, does not contain as much information as could be added in the time available if were just tagged with various keywords and uploaded. Hopefully, though, the time spent organizing the information will result in a more useful, if a bit smaller, library.
The Crittenden Automotive Library - Content
Let me make one thing clear: The Crittenden Automotive Library is NOT intended to compete with Wikipedia. We are not here to copy it or replace it, either. At first glance, topic pages at The Crittenden Automotive Library have a similar look to Wikipedia pages. They're mostly white, there's a left-hand navigational bar with a grayed-out background image, a topic title at the top of the main section, a summary of the topic and more detailed information organized into subheadings. Content from Wikipedia, Wikinews, and Wikimedia Commons is frequently found in the Library. What sets the Library apart from Wikipedia, however, are three things. One is the scope of the information. The Crittenden Automotive Library is limited to topics regarding automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, similar road vehicles and the roads they drive on. An encyclopedia features summaries of its topics, while this Library publishes all available information on a topic. While some of the Library's information comes from Wikipedia much of it comes from Wikipedia's companion projects - Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and Wikinews - and doesn't appear on the Wikipedia page for a particular topic. While they are an immensely valuable source, it is a very different type of resource. As different as an encyclopedia and a library, which is what I hoped to convey with the name The Crittenden Automotive Library.
I believe that commentary and press releases can also be important to history. Whether I personally believe them to be biased or wrong, I still believe they have value to historians as an indication of public opinion at the time they are written or of a company's view of its own products or services. I also believe advertisements have value to the overall body of knowledge, and as such press releases and other advertisements are also welcome as Library material.
Content is from a wide variety of sources.
One of the most valuable is the public domain. Books, magazines, advertisements, newspaper articles and photographs published before 1923 are in the public domain, which means nobody owns a copyright on them. This is a treasure trove of information free to use in any way, except that it is very limited in that it doesn't cover much of anything after the end of 1922. There are some public domain sources from the period between 1923 and 1977 that are public domain because the copyrights weren't renewed or materials were published without copyright notice, but those sources are very limited. The exception is material produced by the United States government. Anything produced by the U.S. government is public domain, and that ranges from military journalists taking photos of the NASCAR race cars their branches sponsor (some of the very first photographs on the site not taken by myself) to vehicle safety information from the NHTSA and news from the Voice of America.
Another source is licensed material. Thanks to the open content movement, many photographers and writers publish their information under GNU FDL licenses or Creative Commons licenses. I already mentioned that I have a lot of material from Wikipedia, which is published under a variety of licenses, depending on the part of Wikipedia the material is from. Still others allow their writings to be redistributed under custom licenses (a body of works collectively referred to as "free reprint articles") that usually include leaving links to their websites intact (remember, even poorly written advertisement-heavy writing has some value to history, even if it's more cultural than technical).
One great source is the generosity of people who allow me to republish their works in my Library. Photographers, writers, and car clubs have all contributed material to the Library, including dozens of newsletters, hundreds of photographs, and hundreds of news articles and commentaries.
The last major source of information is myself. I attend cruise nights, car shows, races and model car shows with my trusty 8MP Canon SX100 IS (the 4MP Canon PowerShot A85 was forced into retirement...by my 3-year old son) and add the photographs taken to the various topic pages of the Library. Of course, based on limitations of time and money my photographs are mostly from McHenry County, Illinois and areas nearby. The farthest east I've traveled for Only a small portion of these photos ever get licensed for others to use, not because I have anything against giving back to the open content community when it has allowed me to build so much of my library, but because I need something substantial in the Library that no one else has to prevent the Library from being copied nearly completely. As so much of my material is licensed or public domain, that's a real possibility, as evidenced by some topic-specific Wikipedia clones I've seen online. Now that I've built a substantial body of work I do intend to contribute more to the open content community and give back to those who have made the Library possible.
The Crittenden Automotive Library - Purpose
The purpose of The Crittenden Automotive Library is to be a useful resource of free automotive information. That's the simplest way I can state it. But there's more to it...
Preserving the present for future historical research What happened yesterday, what happens today and what will happen tomorrow are likely not historically important. They might be, someday, but the events are still too current to be "history" just yet. However, without people preserving records of current events and photographs of current automobiles, historians of the future will not have the proper resources with which to work. Every historic document is available today because someone before us preserved it, including all the public domain information I've published from the very earliest days of automobiles going back into the 1890's. We would have so much more had people of the past been able to preserve more than they did.
Preserving all of automotive history Really, there are plenty of books already on the Ford Mustang and the Chevrolet Corvette. They are great cars, but they are but a small slice of the automotive history pie. While a small percentage of the driving public actually uses such cars on a regular basis, the rest of the world is getting around on Hyundai Accents, Vauxhall Astras, Toyota Camrys and working out of white Ford Econoline vans. While a lot of preservation centers around what is interesting (because the reality is that a 1970 Chevelle SS is much more interesting than a 1982 Citation) it paints a narrow and distorted view of automotive history.
Assisting others in our purpose While one of the stated purposes of The Crittenden Automotive Library is to "preserve all of automotive history," it's just not physically possible for one man to do, even if I worked on it 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Just as brick-and-mortar libraries form networks and assist each other because no one library has every book ever published (not even the enormous Library of Congress), anyone who seeks to create a unique automotive information resource library and contribute new information (rather than just copying what I have done) will find assistance and advice available from an experienced colleague.
The Crittenden Automotive Library - Operations
The Crittenden Automotive Library is not a non-profit organization. I keep the Library free of charge and work to improve upon it as a hobby for now, possibly as a business later, but I will always keep it free and open to all because I support the free exchange of information and have the potential of advertising revenue as a source of income. If you own a business, automotive-related or not, you can advertise either in the Library or one of the other sections of CarsAndRacingStuff.com. E-mail if you're interested.
I do hope that if I can get enough sponsorship that I can leave the "day job" behind and devote more time to automotive history. I don't intend to build this Library so that I spend the rest of my life on a sandy beach with an umbrella drink (although I reserve the right to take vacations). I hope to use the additional time and money to travel to events outside my current geographic area, purchase better computer equipment (I'm always running low on storage...there's a lot of data involved in this operation) and better media recording equipment (I don't have a digital camcorder yet, and I'd like good audio recording equipment for a project I have in mind) and to have the time to go to government records offices and pore over old documents that haven't been digitized yet (I'd love to find, scan and publish the transcripts for the Tucker trial).
The current main geographic area for my photography is McHenry County, Illinois. Based in Woodstock, at the center of the county, most of the events I attend are in the city of McHenry, Woodstock, Richmond or the surrounding area. The closest race tracks to my home are Rockford Speedway, Wilmot Speedway, The Milwaukee Mile and Chicagoland Speedway.
Operations are, so far, mostly English. It's the only language I know fluently enough to be sure that I'm really reading and saying what I think I'm reading and saying. However, I am adding a few articles in Italian, and German and Spanish will likely appear soon as well. Also, while I've had to become well versed in the basics of United States copyright law, I'm not as familiar with the copyright laws of other countries, so using foreign-language books and other media is so far beyond my capabilities at this time (an excellent opportunity for someone else, however, to create another automotive library, and I would help!). Thanks to several web-based translation programs (such as Babel Fish) I don't really need to translate every page of the site into another language, either. It should be understood, and obvious if you've browsed some of the Library before coming to this page, that most of the terminology is in the American version of the English language. Again, it's what I'm most familiar with, however, you may see British English terminology used in many of the articles (which are posted unedited) as many of them are from the UK.
Last edited August 20, 2009
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Any trademarks or service marks appearing here in nominative use are property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with or in any way endorse The Crittenden Automotive Library.
Most of the collectibles lists on the site (including model kits, die cast cars and cards) are not complete due to the enormous volume of items available. They are intended to help users find what items may be available, but are not good as checklists. The driver Win Lists usually consist of major event wins.
To notify the staff of CarsAndRacingStuff.com/The Crittenden Automotive Library of errors, to contribute information or to ask a question e-mail us.
We're always looking for more sources and material for the Library. You can promote your automotive-related or photography business by contributing to the Library. See our Advertising page for more information.
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