Before anyone gets worried, let me reassure you that I haven’t sent my real estate-selling partner off to hang his shingle in front of the building (how would one do a market analysis of a library, I wonder).
While you can’t buy the building, thanks to the folks at Kirtas Technologies and OCLC working with us on our mass digitization program, you can buy more than 90,000 titles from McMaster University Library’s collection. The digitize on demand site for our collection pulls the pieces together: Kirtas populates the site and manages the sales and order processing (saves us worrying about credit cards and shipping), OCLC provides the metadata (see, cataloguing is beneficial), and we provide the books and the digitization.
The site has been up for a few weeks and we’re getting a steady stream of requests. There have been a few bumps: the record pull wasn’t filtered quite as much as it should have been (no, we really can’t digitize those microform versions, and I suspect EEBO would be cranky if we tried to re-sell their files), and we said good-bye to our scanner operator when he decided to go back to college. But, with a new operator in place and the workflow getting sorted out, we’re ready to start promoting this service and see if we can’t boost our numbers.
So if you’re looking for that perfect Christmas gift (and, like me, you haven’t even thought of shopping yet), how about a copy of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, Charles Kingsley’s At Last a Christmas in the West Indies, or maybe The Holy Time of Christmas Defended Against Non-Conformists and all Others its Prophaners and Opposers, published in 1676? Each copy printed just for you. They make great stocking stuffers!