Bookworms get their hands dirty

The State Library of Queensland has launched a website specifically resourced to help car enthusiasts. Dubbed The Garage the website offers access to the Library's extensive collections of rare, classic car restoration manuals and images.

Accodint to the Library, classic car collectors, restorers and enthusiasts throughout Australia and beyond can use the site's search facility to locate and request maintenance and repair information for pre-1970 vehicle models.

Located at  www.slq.qld.gov.au/garage, The Garage includes information from many useful and hard-to-find manuals, for example manufacturers' official repair manuals and manuals from technical publishers such as Chilton and Haynes. Highly-valued compendium "service station manuals" which provide servicing information for all vehicles sold in a given year can also be searched by make and model.

According to State Librarian, Lea Giles-Peters, the website will also0 feature over 500 images of historical vehicles. These are sourced from the State Library's John Oxley Library, and are available via a searchable image gallery.

The gallery will be of interest to vehicle restorers who are seeking to authenticate details for car restoration projects, the Library asserts.

"Thanks to the impressive indexing work done by State Library volunteers, the contents of many formerly obscure service manuals will now be more easily identified on State Library's web catalogue," said Giles-Peters.

"Two dedicated volunteers with a passion for cars have contributed over ten years of car manual indexing work to make The Garage web resource possible. It really is an extraordinary achievement," she said.