Housing over 500,000 printed items in La Mesa, the Automotive Research Library of the Horseless Carriage Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public educational archive established in 1985 with more than five million scanned pages of automotive literature at its facility at 8186 Center Street, Suite F, near Grossmont Center—two blocks from Grossmont Center near Interstate 8. The collection emphasizes pre-1942 American automobiles and spans owner manuals, illustrated parts books, sales catalogs, repair guides, and periodical runs dating to 1895, serving as a primary-source archive for restorers, historians, and scholars who also use the general reference resources at La Mesa Branch Library. Previously housed at the San Diego Automotive Museum in Balboa Park, the library relocated to its own La Mesa facility in August 1995 to accommodate a growing collection that includes personal archives donated by automotive designers and historians. The HCFI Bookstore opens on the second Saturday of each month, and the foundation brings a vintage Model T Ford to school presentations across the county. Classic and vintage vehicle restorers in East County, including the technicians at Dennis Sherman Foreign Car Service, consult the library's digitized periodical database for factory specifications, wiring diagrams, and original parts-number cross-references. Cataloging protocols require optical character recognition processing of brittle pre-war publications, climate-controlled storage for bound volumes, and keyword-indexed digital retrieval systems that allow remote researchers to search and purchase scanned content through a secure web portal.