United Rare Books Collections Database
© ideated by Diana Bychkova, BFA, MFA, MLIS, PhD
Embedded Files
Transcript for the video >>>>
United Rare Books Collections Database
An educational platform with a collection of small stories and items
The first time I opened this 14th–century manuscript, I held my breath. The parchment felt like pressed velvet beneath my hands, and a barely perceptible relief of ink, with which the letters were written, made me imagine the monk who wrote it—candle burning low, quill in hand, each letter drawn slowly… Did he know that someone, 700 years later, would be reading his work? This book was brought to our family from an old church that was going to be destroyed.
Like fictional time travel, antique books can transport us to locations and epochs in which they were created.
Many Canadian university and colleges libraries hold amazing, valuable rare books like this—unique for their creation history and cultural significance on the international level. Most of such collections sit in silence. Misfiled, misunderstood, simply invisible and lost to scholars, artists, and the public. The catalogue entries of small, rare collections—if they exist—tell us nothing. Just a name. A title. A date, if known. Thousands of rare and antique volumes are buried in general online catalogues and present rare items as common books.
No one knows they exist except a handful of experts —these extraordinary, timeworn volumes filled with art, thought, and culture. While dedicated stewards have done what they can with limited means, these treasures remain hidden from the world.
But you can change that.
These books are not common. Texts in rare books have been reprinted or republished many times and can be equally read from modern editions of the same texts. Rare collections are all about a physical object, a kind of edition, and therefore require a different type of presentation. These books carry the voices of our ancestors, the artistry of centuries. Each one is a whisper from the past.
With your help, we’ll gather, digitize, research, organize, and share these books online—beautifully, accessibly, permanently—and bring together the rare books collections and prints dispersed across Canada.
You can help not just preserve them for posterity, but make them available to everyone who longs to be moved, challenged, or inspired by them. Let’s bring them into the hands - and hearts - of a new generation.
Your investment will help build a national-scale, AI-powered database that aims to make cultural memory accessible; solve the problem of inadequate representation of antique items from 20+ libraries across Canada; provide resources across educational materials; transmit the passion for antique and beautiful objects created by human hands. In the world of antiquarian books, there is something exhilarating about hand-made objects, a personal touch that connects us to the past.
The Database is designed by a book professional for individuals working in the fields of book professions: book history, visual arts, history of art, literature, cultures, library science, private book collectors, art schools, the art industry in large.
Every gift unlocks stories waiting to be rediscovered, and opens up the possibility to keep developing this project over the following years.
I still remember that first book. The weight. The smell. The silence.
These books changed me.
With your help, these books won't be lost – they can teach, inspire, and enrich many more lives.
For $100, you can bring one rare book into the light.
For $300, you can share its story with thousands, or help create an educational video.
For $1,000, you can unlock a trip to an entire collection to work with their holdings.
Every gift revives a piece of our shared cultural memory.
You can give voice to people who never thought they'd be heard.
You can put your name behind something timeless—and urgently needed.
Explore more details in the description below, and support the project to make a difference.
We would be honoured to speak with you. www.rarecollections.dsartistrylabs.com
1. The Core Problem
The Challenge We Face
Across Canada, rare book collections are being lost — not by fire, but by neglect.
📚 Thousands of volumes are listed with only minimal metadata (Author, Title, Year)
📚 Historic items — some over 300-500 years old — sit miscatalogued and underrepresented
📚 Once damaged by light, humidity, or time, these works cannot be recovered
And yet these books matter deeply. They reveal:
📚 How we migrated, printed, traded, taught, worshipped, and imagined
📚 The beauty of hand-bound, hand-illuminated, hand-printed, human-crafted knowledge
But if we do nothing, this history will remain invisible — and be lost to time.
While a few major university libraries in Canada maintain separate catalogues for their rare collections, only a couple of them include both detailed bibliographic descriptions and high-quality images, alongside historical research for each item. None, however, provide advanced search capabilities—such as filters based on physical and artistic features (by style, material, geography, creator, artistic technique, historic method of bookmaking)—to help users meaningfully explore and discover these objects.
Most university and college libraries hold thousands of rare and antique books and prints that remain buried within general library catalogues, losing their discoverability. These items are often miscatalogued, misfiled, or simply invisible — books of remarkable beauty, significance, and cultural value that are effectively lost to scholars, artists, and the public.
Such collections originate from across the globe — Italy, Germany, Greece, England, France, India, Arab states, Slavic nations, and beyond. They represent not only Canada’s multicultural heritage but also the history of the countries of their origin, making them an invaluable resource for education, research, and creative work. Yet today, no one knows they exist except a handful of experts. While dedicated stewards have done what they can with limited means, these treasures remain hidden from the world.
Our organization started to design this project in early 2021 as a necessary tool to fill in the descriptive/visual gap existing in the rare books collections at a large Canadian Academic Institution. The primary focus was on creating an appropriate representation with bibliographic descriptions. Over the following years, efforts were made to do this work, but to date funding has not been available. In the meantime, we examined rare collections in other Canadian libraries and found similar challenges: many librarians recognize the value of such an initiative but are unable to pursue it due to ongoing budget cuts and a lack of necessary staffing.
2. Our Vision
In the past four years, we have developed a comprehensive vision of the platform with all-inclusive components necessary to meet community exigencies in the field. We are building a permanent solution: an open access database to bring these hidden treasures up to the world.
The United Rare Books Collections Database — a national-scale, AI-supported platform intended to:
📚Highlight and centralize underrepresented rare book collections in Canada.
📚Support educators, librarians, researchers, book artists, collectors, and the general public.
📚Showcase the beauty, craftsmanship, and cultural significance of rare and antique books.
📚Provide broad preserving, discovering, researching, learning capacities and share Canada’s cultural treasures. Nothing like this exists yet in Canada since rare books collections are, in most cases, remain hidden and dispersed through local sites.
📚We use book history and rare collections as primary sources to create digital environments, online exhibits, learning experiences and awareness about the physicality, craftsmanship, and emotional connection offered by historical books and manuscripts.
📚Although the number of participating institutions is large, many of them hold small to medium-sized collections that fall within our scope — books and prints on any subject, with a particular focus on the book as an object, i.e. items that tell us about the history and art of bookmaking, from the medieval to pre-1800 editions.
📚Our ambitious goal is to bring all of these collections together into a united, accessible platform. The project is currently in its early stages of development, and we are making steady progress through a series of small steps and improvements towards our destination.
We warmly invite large and small collectors, private and institutional, bookshops and dealers, and individuals who own one or few rare books or prints—to share their valuable pieces. By adding them to the database, we aim to increase their visibility and make them available for research, education, and discovery.
We are committed to an open-access model that carefully respects institutional and personal permissions, upholds data sovereignty, and ensures proper attribution to all contributors.
📚The Database will be created on many levels and include the following cross linked components >>>>
AI-Enhanced Discovery Interface
Invites curiosity, exploration, and serendipity. Enables intuitive search, browsing, and exploration by theme, material, geography, creator, artistic technique, historic method of bookmaking.
A catalogue of rare collections held across Canada
Provides bibliographic descriptions to those collections that do not have appropriate catalogues (DCRM with broader historical research and details on bookmaking), helping them to get a new look through appropriate representations. This will allow users to study the styles and methods of book creation, writing/typography, layout, decorations, physical condition, annotations, and physical features lost in existing catalogues, etc.
High-Resolution Clickable Images
Captures a few fragments per item (not a full digitization) of bindings, handwriting, style of ornamentations, typesetting, layout, marginalia, annotations, and physical features — all this does not exist in library catalogues.
Metadata Expansion Tools
Builds layered catalogue entries including provenance, art history, material analysis etc., which is cross linked with the collections presented and with the educational materials.
Interactive Exhibits, Artistic Tours, Learning Modules
Serves artists, scholars, educators, and the public through accessible tools, lectures, articles, educational videos on the history of bookmaking and printing. Primary sources presented in the Database are used to create such educational videos.
Preservation-Ready Architecture
Ensures long-term digital stewardship with data portability, backups, and archival fidelity
📚Digital Access, Not Digital Replacement
While libraries strive to create optimal environments—carefully regulating light and humidity—to preserve rare collections, the growing perception of digital reproductions as substitutes for physical objects raises important concerns. These were articulated by G.T. Tanselle in the 1990s and have only become more relevant today.
Our approach promotes a different perspective: presenting rare collections online not as replacements, but as invitations:
To raise awareness of their existence.
To encourage in-person engagement with the original objects.
3. Broad Institutional Support
The project has support from 12 Canadian university libraries, all of which have committed access to their rare materials and wrote letters affirming their interest and need for the initiative – even though they are unable to fund it themselves. See screenshots of selected letters below.
The reality for many libraries is that they operate with extremely limited staff, making it difficult not only to participate in external initiatives but even to pay attention to them. This remains true even when it is clearly communicated that no investment or obligation is required on their part. These libraries can be grouped together as institutions lacking sufficient human resources. Such replies underscore the need for our project—particularly among collections that do not have the capacity to properly care for their holdings or develop discovery tools on their own.
See an excerpt from one of such responses we received >>>
“… We are swamped with projects in the archives at the moment and don’t have capacity to take on any new initiatives at this time. I would like to look closely at this project, but quite honestly, I don’t even have time to digest your proposal or engage in a conversation about this work. It is not that this isn’t potentially an important initiative, but I am also the only archivist in my institution, and caring for our archival collections should be about 90% of my job, and special collections 10%. Right now, visibility of our special collections is low on my list of priorities, not because it’s not important, but I’m dealing with quite a few absolutely critical matters at the moment. I have a staff of 1, so you can imagine how much capacity we have.
... Of course, you are welcome to come and do research in our reading room, just like any other researcher. If you are using photos you have taken yourself, there is no need to ask us for permission to use them for your project, provided you are keeping within copyright and respecting third party privacy.
Thanks for reaching out and I’m happy to hear updates as the project continues.”
4. Why DS Artistry Labs?
Founder & project lead:
Dr. Diana Bychkova, MFA, MLIS, PhD
A book historian, book artist, restorer, and library and information science specialist, Diana’s combined background with 20+ years of experience spanning Ukraine, Italy, and Canada—in book arts, librarianship, and academic research—bridges practice and theory in rare book stewardship, offering a rare blend of scholarly insight and hands-on expertise.
She has collaborated with antiquarian shops, libraries, museums; frequently participated in a variety of book/antiquarian fairs across Europe and Canada; created and published award-winning limited edition books using both historical and modern methods of printing and binding; restored antique books providing full historical documentation.
Her core competencies necessary for the project include:
📚History of the book, printing, and handwriting
📚Content development, writing, research, creation of educational materials, and lectures
📚Experiences in complex projects development
📚Work in library assistant positions, with deep knowledge of cataloguing standards, long-term digital preservation practices, community needs, and ability to create the representation tools.
The present project is the culmination of Diana’s interdisciplinary background, merging artistic, academic, and rare books collections practices to create an innovative, user-centered platform for rare book discovery.
Learn more on the ABOUT page.
Organization Overview:
DS Artistry Labs (legal name: DS Artistry Collections Inc.) is a registered non-profit based in London, Ontario. We are committed to the preservation, exploration, and educational engagement with rare and antique objects.
The organization focuses on illuminating the craftsmanship, cultural value, and emotional resonance of historical books through both physical and digital experiences.
We work in partnership with academic libraries, heritage institutions, and archival professionals.
Our unique strength lies in bridging artistic representation, technical infrastructure, and heritage preservation into one coherent, scalable project—our flagship initiative—The United Rare Books Collections Database.
Visit our main website for more details: www.dsartistrylabs.com
5. Database Partners
Contributors:
Jodi Younger, audio recording
Join us on this exciting path! Please send us a word if you believe your expertise can contribute to the project: info@dsartistrylabs.com
We are searching >>>>
1.
A group of students, supervised by a teacher, who could build (perhaps as their coursework) a prototype of the platform’s architecture with samples of all the components. In parallel, we are currently reviewing RFPs from Canadian AI research labs with cultural preservation portfolios.
Partner capacity includes:
📚Capacity to deploy scalable cloud-based infrastructure with metadata-rich schema
📚Expertise in IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) standards
📚Open-source design philosophy with data protection
📚AI-powered tools for advanced catalogue search
2. A social media person to promote this project.
We will be searching in the future:
1.
MLIS students to build and upload to the platform thousands of schedules for rare collections, with appropriate descriptions, images, etc. All the texts and images will be provided, but we will need a technical assistant.
Required (one task per person):
📚Experience in MARC (or outstanding course works completed)
📚Advanced experience in Photoshop, ability to work with library/archival images, and create image metadata
Preferred: familiarity with DCRM standards, interest in rare/antique books, reading knowledge of European languages other than English.
2.
Experts in narrow areas whose expertise focuses on a single country and epoch (e.g. book culture in 12th-century Germany, or 15th-century Italy, etc.) to contribute a historic note on a given book/print, to write broader articles, to provide interviews or video lectures, or to add their existing educational materials to the database.
6. Funding Requirements & Gap
Phase 1 (in progress) Production plan: project scoping, initial library partnerships, preliminary research of primary sources in the 20+ library catalogues, development of metadata schema based on research across existing library catalogues.
Funding Required: $ 25,000
(secured)
Phase 2 First round: trip to 12 libraries in 10 towns, digitization, catalogue descriptions drafting
Funding Required: $ 35,000
Phase 3 Platform development: research and concept development, prototyping and design, backend/frontend development, testing, tech support.
Funding Required: $ 68,600
Phase 4 Content development: work on primary sources/antique objects, creation of DCRM descriptive tables, work on images, research, articles, video-lectures creation, artistic tours, editing, uploading content to the platform (thousands of items, schedules, images, videos).
Funding Required: $ 280,000
Phase 5 National rollout, continuous project development with new collections, AI interface, exhibitions, long-term hosting & sustainability
Funding Required: $ 300,000+
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Current funding gap for Phase 2: $35,000 that will allow us to travel to the libraries, to start working with primary sources and build a strong base for the whole project.
Seeking leadership gifts at $5,000–$25,000+
Your investment will:
Help to perform trips to the libraries to gather the information on primary sources
Fund high-resolution digitization, cataloguing, and conservation metadata
Allow creation of dozens or hundreds of educational materials provided by the variety of experts in the field
Help build a sustainable, scalable, and AI-enhanced infrastructure
Preserve and unite collections from 20+ libraries across Canada and much more private collections
Make cultural memory accessible—for education, research, and future generations
7. Recognition Opportunities
We gratefully recognize our lead supporters through:
Featured collection or gallery naming (digital)
“Founding Patron” recognition on the platform homepage
Donor profile in national launch communications
Invitations to advisory or ambassador circles
Custom engagement (e.g. university lectures, legacy planning)
We are also open to honorific or memorial dedications
(e.g. “In memory of Dr. X, educator and collector”).
8. The Case for You
If you love books...
If you believe in legacy...
If you want to help rescue beauty from silence...
Then this project is for you.
You can help recover what’s been hidden.
You can give voice to people who never thought they'd be heard.
You can put your name behind something timeless—and urgently needed.
We would be honoured to speak with you.
9. Contact
To discuss your gift or proposal package:
📧 info@dsartistrylabs.com
📞 +1 226 580 7442
🌐 www.rarecollections.dsartistrylabs.com
🪪 Legal status: provincial non-profit registered in Ontario
DS Artistry Collections Inc.
Business Number: 72760 9828
10. Support this project to create a change!
10. Support this project to create a change!
Donate to bring rare books into the light
At DS Artistry Labs, we know that change starts with people like you. Every act of kindness, every dollar, and every moment of your time brings us closer to achieving our mission. Together, we can create a brighter, more compassionate world for all.
How you can help power our mission:
Donate: Every dollar counts. Contribute now to help us reach our goal.
Shop online: Purchase any of our art books, prints, beautiful items, or gift cards. Please check - you will like them!
Order any of our services: in Fine Carving Lab (custom-made collectibles, such as miniature sculprites, walking stiks, beautiful objects for everyday use, designed and hand-crafted from precious woods, ivory, corals, amber), Conservation & restoration (books, furniture, paintings, decorative artworks), Bookmaking (complex book projects, artistic bindings and book cases, limited editions from A-to-Z, illustrations, etchings, woodcuts, traditional hand-printing, layout design, calligraphy, ex libris), Rare collections (cataloguing, research, printed catalogues, restoration, artistic bindings and book cases, exhibit curation).
Volunteer: Your time and skills can make an impact too.
Share: Share our campaign with your friends, family, and on social media. Your advocacy can amplify our impact.
Thank you for supporting our mission, your help will make a difference.
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