In July 2005, a group of individuals gathered in Frederick, Md., to discuss protecting historical fire-service documentation. Four-plus years later, those involved with the National Fire Heritage Center hope it will become "an archive for and about America's fire services and fire-protection disciplines." For more information or to make a donation, visit www.nationalfireheritagecenter.org.

Longtime FIRE CHIEF columnist Ronny Coleman is the chair of the center's planning committee.

What prompted the center?

The first thing was a study commissioned by the U.S. Fire Administration about the archiving of America's fire history. The study was performed and delivered to the USFA, but there was no mechanism in place to do anything about it. Harry Hickey was involved in the original research, and I was approached by several people from the fire administration to get involved and help them make this center become a reality. Wayne Powell, at the time with the USFA, asked me to work with the group, so I held a meeting in Maryland and brought together the principals. We took the report, wrote a strategic plan and began to implement it about four years ago.

How will you raise funds?

We're in the process of doing any type of fundraising activity we can. We're also relying on donations from industry. The interesting thing about the National Fire Heritage Center, it is not about the fire service — it's about the fire profession. We've got fire-protection engineers engaged in this effort also, so it's about fire protection, too.

Are you looking for equipment?

We are restricting this center to documents — not equipment. We call it the "preservation of the perishable." In fact, we have specifications for an old Ahrens Fox apparatus. What we're interested in is mining the documented history that ordinarily gets tossed out in the trash.

One example is original manuscripts. I have one of the original letters from the royal architect to the king of England about fire prevention after the fire in 1066. Two people recently told me they had boxes of the history of the Delaware Fire Department and the old Underwriters patrols.

What happens if you become inundated with these items?

We have contingency plans. We have an acquisition policy, which means we don't accept everything — we accept what's appropriate. We're not going to accept everybody's magazine collection. We reserve the right to archive, recycle or redirect that stuff; that's what the Smithsonian does.

We also have a contingency plan for storage that we're working out with the Sisters of Charity and the local ambulance company. For lack of a better term, we need to succeed to be successful. We have to do something so people can see it and that will drive the nature of future donations.

If you have items that the center can't use, will you redirect those items to local fire-department museums?

Not only that, we'll have a policy statement that we don't want people to give us stuff that has a natural home already. I'm a member of the nationwide fire museum network, and we're starting to build links between us and other paper collections like Philadelphia's fire museum.

What are your plans for digital access?

The intent is to scan everything we can get our hands on. We have patterned this after the Army's historical center. You can't go there and look at the original papers; it will be the digital version. The theory is to make it as transferable as possible.

Shouldn't the National Fire Academy have these documents?

The NFA cannot function in the capacity we're attempting. They have a disposal policy; they don't keep anything over a certain age … and most people don't know that.

What we're trying to preserve is the institutional memory that sometimes goes away when people pass away or leave the fire service and preserve those stories that need to be told and institutionalized. We need to interview individuals like Lou Amabili and ask him what was it like when he put together America Burning, because he's one of the only people left. We have some trepidation about being too successful because there's a whole bunch of people out there. We're targeting some specific people — all over 75 years old. They are all leaving us.

That is fairly quick for such a historic and monumental task, isn't it?

We think we've been moving at a rapid rate compared to what other people thought would happen. We would be in the building today if hadn't been for some delays and some arrangement of the building itself.