One reason why I collect aerospace historical documents and diagrams, scan them and distribute them is because when things are held in a single place, a single event can destroy history. This happened when the San Diego Air and Space Museum burned to the ground in 1978 as a result of arson, destroying its collection of aircraft, artifacts, books and documents. The aerospace community promptly rallied around the ruined museum and contributed more aircraft, artifacts, books and documents to help build a brand new less flammable museum… but a whole lot of things were just simply gone. I’ve seen the current SDASM archive (at least as it existed around a decade ago), and can only imagine what it *might* have been had the original contents not been lost.
The video below comes from the SDASM YouTube account. It’s hard to watch… for several reasons.