Today is the last day that you can vote in the Society of Automotive Historians’ board-of-directors election. According to an email blast, as of this morning only 73 out of 622 members had voted. Four candidates are running for three positions. I was particularly enthusiastic about voting for Clio Reid. She is a history and library science graduate student who as SAH’s Social Media Chair has revitalized its Facebook presence.
If you haven’t been to the SAH’s website in a while, now would be a good time to take another look. They have been upgrading their web and social-media presence. That includes shifting publications such as the Auto History Review to an all-electronic format. SAH has also launched a Discord channel that would appear to be much more active than a forum at the Antique Automobile Club’s website.
One downside of the changes is the discontinuance of a $20-per-year, electronic-only membership. Dues will be $40 for all members as of Oct. 1. Will this make it harder for younger and less-affluent people to participate? Back in the print era I let my SAH membership lapse for a while because I was entering grad school and could no longer afford their regular dues.
And since I’m grumbling, I should mention that when I tried to log into the SAH website I once again had a technical problem. I couldn’t get in until I changed my password. This is a recurring hassle that has discouraged me from regularly using the website. Hopefully it is an isolated problem.
Photo vault is a good idea whose usability is limited
Among the changes made to the website include the return of a photo vault. SAH President Chris Lezotte (2026) wrote in a recent e-newsletter that “the purpose of the collection is to provide a source of images for SAH members to use in published work and presentations without needing to go through the permission process. With over 7000 photographs available, the SAH photo vault is an important resource for automotive scholars, historians, and enthusiasts alike.”
This looks like a promising service, but if I am reading correctly Indie Auto can’t use it. This is because permission to use a photo is not granted “if the publication can become freely available over the internet.” So I would need to pull Indie Auto completely behind a paywall to draw upon vault photos? That’s not going to happen. At most I might shift to a partial paywall, but then I would have to worry about whether the stories that I made freely available had any SAH photos.
Also see ‘Wheel spinning happens when car buffs and scholarly historians don’t collaborate’
Indie Auto could plausibly start publishing e-books, which can use vault photos. However, to do so “each image must be watermarked” (SAH, 2026). This is such an intrusive citation method that I would rather do without SAH photos unless I were desperate. What’s curious about their rules — which are much stricter than those required of Wikipedia’s Creative Commons — is that the quality of SAH photos is not typically any better. For example, their AMC photos consist entirely of snapshots from auto shows. The images look like they were taken with a smart phone and do not appear to be edited for composition or lighting.
So while I appreciate that photographers were willing to share their work and SAH is providing a venue for making it available, the needs of print-based media would appear to be given a higher priority than web-based media. This strikes me as backward rather than than forward looking.
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RE:SOURCES
- Lezotte, Chris; 2026. “From the President.” SAH Newsletter. September issue.
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