Search the papers
In 1985 Miles asked Tom Snodgrass and Muthiah Kasi to do something with his papers. At this time Snodgrass and Kasi were in the midst of writing their book, Function Analysis: The Stepping Stones to Good Value. Snodgrass recalls that when he told Miles about the constraints on his time, Miles graciously encouraged Snodgrass to continue with his book rather than taking on the paper collection project. Miles died shortly after in August 1985.
Kurt F. Wendt library staff have scanned all the L.D. Miles personal papers in the Lawrence D. Miles Value Engineering Reference Center and made them available on this Web site.
There are approximately 1700 items in the Papers Collection, starting in 1943 and culminating with Miles' papers from 1985. You can search the papers collection by type of document (article, correspondence, slide, etc.), by subject (definitions, methodology, philosophy, training, etc.), and year. You can also search by author, title and content fields with any term or combination of terms.
The following examples give you a taste of what you will find in this interesting collection:
- Typewritten minutes from a 1948 Engineering Council meeting of the General Electric Co. The council established a Value Analysis unit to make the VA system and techniques available to the whole company. They appointed L.D. Miles to head the new unit.
- A copy of the entire journal of the Society of Japanese Value Engineers published in 1966 (in Japanese) which contained two articles by Miles: "Message to the Society of Japanese Value Engineers" and "The Fundamentals of Value Engineering."
- A letter dated September 1953 from Rear Admiral R.T. Cowdrey to the president of GE praising Miles' presentation of Value Analysis to the naval shipyards
- A 1972 manuscript by Miles titled, "Compete Successfully-Use This Thinking System." Miles explains the "disciplined thinking system" and refers to four kinds of thinking: information, analysis, creative, judgment.
Due to the condition of some of the original documents, it has not always been possible to achieve clear electronic images. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and ask that you contact us at askwendt@engr.wisc.edu to report unreadable images or files.