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, conversion, fulfillment, and distribution 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 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the initial development of BiblioVault and the print center with three grants totaling $3.2 million.

The Repository

The BiblioVault repository serves more than 100 scholarly presses and stores files for more than 75,000 books.

Most books published over the past 15 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.

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, depositing files, and working with BiblioVault's password-protected website.

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 CDC'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 search and marketing services, such as Google Books and Amazon Search Inside the Book
  • Preparing files and delivering them to digital book vendors, such as Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple Books, Kobo, ebooks.com, EBSCO, ProQuest, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Google Play, etc.
  • Delivering files to the accessibility offices of colleges and universities
  • Producing excerpts or complete ebooks in PDF, html, or epub formats
  • Custom file alteration and delivery services as requested by presses
  • Conversion from PDF to epub
  • Delivery of protected ebooks as complimentary copies for text exam or review uses
  • Fulfillment of electronic books (protected or unprotected) for press shopping carts

BiblioVault's Website

At BiblioVault's public website (https://www.bibliovault.org), visitors can search the repository's 75,000 works by title, author, or ISBN. 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 book purchase. Accessibility offices can request files for reading-disabled students from these pages as well.

BiblioVault's website includes a 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.

For more information about BiblioVault and the services it offers, or for a tour of the BiblioVault website, please contact us at bv-info@uchicago.edu.