I've done a share of preserving a part of history, and in my business dealings have always respected copyrights and ownership with credit lines, but that wasn't the point. As I stated in my previous message it was in support of your position that no other individual has a 'right' to the material you have collected or unearthed by your own personal research and artifact gathering, no matter what they think. The demands made which you described are totally out of bounds. I fully understand what can drive peopel to shredding their life's work, even if I think it borders on the criminal to do so.
What I am saying is once you have no more use for the materials, they are still important to our cultural heritage, and no telling that someone in 2656 going through some archive in a library won't find some bit you saved as critical to understanding our past. Anyone with a collection of anything has preserved things for future generations, not for the boors that demand the information of you now. Well, maybe my string collection isn't so important. The "it belongs to everyone" is meant to apply to a public or private library that is dedicated to preserving such works. Anyone who thinks they are "in the right" to destroy whatever thay have clearly doesn't see past their own nose, which they are so willing to cut off for spite.
I recently read Bruce MacGregor's book, "The Birth of California Narrow Gauge", and he indicated that almost all of the Carter Brothers drawings, records and papers are nowhere to be found, lost to us all. It would certainly be a shame if those were once in a private collector's hands and they decided to burn the lot rather than let 'so and so' get them.
How much of what we do have was rescued in the wee hours from dumpsters when a fallen flag railroad office was cleaned out? DeGolyer has preserved Baldwin records for us all. What about Rogers or Cook or Schenectady? Some we have left, some we don't.
The only thing I am advocating is that those who have created a collection of work that is important, consider finding an avenue to share that information at a later date, even if that means it sits in a box in the archives of some library or museum and doesn't see the light of day for 50 years. A case in point is the records of the Tonopah and Tidewater, which are in some 30-40 boxes in the Huntington Library. Only serious researchers even have a chance to gain access to such materials. Find a way to share with future generations if the current ones don't suit you. Destruction just erases a bit more of our past.
