Museums, Local Studies Libraries, Record Offices & Societies • Individuals • Book Traders

Some of the books you find in our inventory have been kindly lent to The Project by various individuals, and some by Record Offices, Museums, Family History Societies and Libraries. We call these our Cooperative Projects.

The remaining books in the inventory we have purchased. All of them are old and rare. Many of the books purchased from book dealers and other commercial sources (no matter how expensive they were) are subsequently given away to one of the above organizations.*

* We have a policy of giving away books to places where they will be preserved rather than subjected to heavy use.

Cooperative Projects with Museums, Libraries and Records Offices

What does your organization get out of it? If you allow us to carefully scan your valuable resources we can give you some of the high quality, easy to use, CDs containing a complete recorded scan of the book. Your clients can borrow and use the CD just as they used to borrow and use the book but without subjecting it to all that every-day wear and tear. So now you can keep that valuable book for just those who need to examine the actual original volume – not just its contents.
We’ll even try* and make a machine readable text translation of the book using our state of the art OCR software, and place it as an invisible layer behind the picture of the pages so that simple text searches can be made using your computer, if all you’re looking for is a quick reference.

* Not all old printing can be recognized in the OCR process and while we expect the recognition statistics to score in the high 90% range no OCR software anywhere can guarantee to recognize every word. There’s still no substitute for the human eye and brain – thank goodness!

If you like we will even sell your organization copies of the CDs at a wholesale rate so you can resell them to your clients and make a little money for your pet project.

We all gain
The Record Offices gain
The Local Studies Libraries gain
The Museums gain
The Family History Societies gain

Book dealers have made their sale so even they gain

And in the process we, the genealogists and historians, gain access to these old and rare primary sources of data in their original form.
No-one loses

We will be doing our best to contact all the above organizations, right across the country, but in the meantime if you represent one of these organizations, or even if you think an organization would be receptive to our approach, please send an e-mail and we’ll do the rest. Thank you.

Cooperative Projects with Individuals

So you as an individual have an old book you love and cherish. Either you think that others would also find your book useful or interesting, or you’d just like to share it with your family and friends. But you don’t want to give it to give it away to some organization or even loan it to your friends (especially those with young children.) You see that Archive CD Books Canada will make you a private copy on CD. This would let you keep the book AND share it with your friends and family, but you don’t want to go to the expense of having a private copy made.

Get in contact with us anyway. If we agree that your book will have enough interest to our customers, we’ll do the scanning and give you some CDs of it when we return the book. All we ask is that we can sell copies of the CDs to our other customers and supporters, at our normal rock bottom prices, so we can recover our costs. If your book turns out to be a “good seller” we might even volunteer to pay for some conservation work on it.
If your book looks as if it will be a “best seller” we might even consider making a straight cash donation to offset your original costs of obtaining the book or to help you buy another book you want.
Send us an e-mail . We want to hear from you!

Cooperative Projects with Book Traders

You can see that we’re not a threat to you – in fact we may be one of your best customers! Most of the people you sell to want your books because they love old books, if they like the contents that’s a bonus. And anyway, you can only sell the book once.
Well actually – no. You may be able to sell it twice. We will haggle , long and hard, to keep the price we have to charge our customers down to a minimum when we buy a book – unless you would consider selling us the book with a condition that you will buy it back – in the same condition – and for a reasonable price, later. We might even pay a little over the fair market value for that. In effect you rent the book to us but without any risks because we’ve bought the book.

Think about it, you sell the book at a good price. You get to buy back a book you thought was good enough to buy in the first place at a reasonable cost and you still can sell it again.
You get the “rental” money, we get access to the book and our customers get to see the contents, Why, it’s even possible that someone, having seen the CD, goes in search of a copy of the original to buy. – Your original!

Take a look at the Types of Books we’re interested in and if you have something you think we’d like and you’re interested in the proposition send us an e-mail.

The Project is all about making CDs of old and rare books available to genealogists and historians
- at a reasonable price.
It is a "user supported" project.