FROM PRINT TO PIXELS

Autocar’s entire collection of back issues has been painstakingly digitised into a searchable library that documents the whole history of the motor car. Matt Prior finds out how it was done

- Matt Prior

The moment it moved on from a ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ conversation to something more concrete, I might have let out a small yelp of joy.

Taking a trip to the Autocar archive, usually tucked discreetly down some stairs in whichever office Haymarket Media Group has occupied at the time, has been one of the pleasures of working here.

A pleasure denied for too long to too many people. Some libraries and museums have back issues of Autocar, but standing among a full run of issues, which report almost the entire history of the car and which are neatly bound and searchable via handwritten or typed index cards, is a great way to lose an afternoon and miss a deadline. Or two.

Then came the email from Jim Holder, former Autocar editor and now editorial director: ‘Next time you’re down there, can you count how many bound volumes there are and how many pages you think might be in each one?’

It had begun, then, and now it has finished. The back issues of Autocar, formerly Autocar & Motor, originally 1895’s The Autocar, and incorporating a couple of other titles along the way, has been digitised. It’s searchable. You too can have the joy we routinely did. It is brilliant.

The answer, by the way, was 460 bound volumes, containing more than 6000 individual issues across Autocar’s 126 years. Early back-of-envelope estimates reckoned that would mean somewhere in the region of 750,000 pages. It has worked out at rather more than that.