St. Louis Building Arts Foundation Launches Virtual Library

While 52nd City broke the news first, I think that it's still important to note that the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation has created a Flickr account where one can see scans of some of the thousands of interesting items from its library. The recent scans of images from the Mullins Sheet Metal Statuary catalog are intriguing. Another post on the Flickr page is a recent photo of preservationist William Weiss looking at a photo of himself from long ago (from the Foundation's collection). What a great way to showcase one of the most unique architectural study collections in the United States -- one completely assembled by Larry Giles working mostly alone.

The library collection has not been exhaustively cataloged, but it likely contains over 25,000 volumes and twice as many sheet drawings, photographs and primary documents. (My estimates may be conservative.)

The unspoken message is that there is a lot of cool things in the collection, and if you want to see more than a handful of scanned images you can help take the Foundation to the next level at which its holdings may be more widely available.