A Digital Repository for Scholarly Books
BiblioVault helps scholarly publishers preserve and extend the value of their books, providing long-term secure storage of digital book files for member presses, as well as a wide range of scanning, printing, transfer, and conversion services.
Launched in late 2001 by the University of Chicago Press, BiblioVault operates under the umbrella of Chicago Distribution Services, which also oversees a digital printing center, the Chicago Digital Distribution Center (CDDC). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the development of BiblioVault and the CDDC with three grants totaling $3.2 million.
The Repository
The BiblioVault repository serves 60 scholarly presses and contains digital files for more than 14,000 books.
Most books published over the past few years exist as electronic files originally used to print the hard copy. Older books that exist only in hard copy can be scanned to create electronic files. Publishers can deposit both types of files in BiblioVault.
Why participate in BiblioVault?
Maintaining searchable digital book files in BiblioVault enables publishers to manage a book's content throughout its life. A press can use its files to support offset and short-run digital printing, full-text and metadata searches, and electronic delivery of whole and partial books.
By depositing files systematically in BiblioVault, presses gain flexibility and can select the best combination of price and timetable for printings. BiblioVault also eliminates the need to store film or files with printers at hefty fees.
The BiblioVault staff helps presses to convert older titles, to deposit digital files for recent titles, and to use BiblioVault to manage their titles. Staff members provide assistance with file standards for recent books, depositing files, and working with BiblioVault's password-protected Web site.
BiblioVault Services
BiblioVault offers a variety of services to presses. These include:
- Scanning older titles to create print-ready electronic files
- Short-run digital printing at the CDDC's digital printing center
- Evaluation and enhancement of PDFs, to assess their suitability for printing offset or short-run and to fully prep them for conversion to other formats (includes chapter assembly, preflighting, basic corrections, page-through, and bookmarking)
- Sending files to any printer a press designates, anywhere in the world.
- Preparing files and delivering them to marketing services, such as Google Print, Amazon Search Inside the Book, Microsoft Live Book Search, and Dial-A-Book
- Preparing files and delivering them to digital book vendors, such as netLibrary, ebrary, ebooks.com, and Questia
- Preparing files and delivering them to reading-disabled students through the accessibility offices of colleges and universities
- Producing excerpts or complete ebooks in PDF or HTML formats
- Addition of ISBN-13 information to pre-2007 files as requested by presses
- Custom file alteration and delivery services as requested by presses
BiblioVault's Web Site
BiblioVault hosts a public Web site at http://www.bibliovault.org, where anyone online can search the repository's 14,000 works by title, author, or ISBN. In 2007, full-text searching will be added. Search results bring up marketing information about the books, including cover thumbnails, tables of contents, excerpts, reviews, and author biographies, when available.
Each of these marketing pages features a link directly into the appropriate press shopping cart, for immediate purchase of the physical book. Accessibility offices can request files for reading-disabled students from these pages as well.
The BiblioVault Web site includes an extensive password-protected publishers' site, where member press users can submit and retrieve their files, edit metadata about their titles, and arrange for services involving their files. The publishers' site allows publishers to transfer their files to BiblioVault, access their files to make changes and corrections, send them to vendors for offset or digital printing, send publicity materials to review media or booksellers, and provide files to electronic aggregators and vendors. BiblioVault staff can undertake these tasks, to save publisher staff time.
The digital content held in BiblioVault can support various eventual uses, including electronic delivery of the full text or selected parts of a book, delivery of parts of a book to support hard-copy printing in coursepacks, or inclusion in digital libraries or databases.
For more information about BiblioVault and the services it offers, or for a tour of the BiblioVault Web site, please contact Kate Davey at 773-834-4417 or kdavey@press.uchicago.edu.