Preserving Fragile & Rare Collections – Challenges, Practices

Home 9 Blogs 9 Preserving Fragile & Rare Collections – Challenges, Practices

With over a decade of experience, variety of professional digitizing equipment to handle any type of books or documents, eRecordsUSA is a local San Francisco Bay Area, California small business, specialized in handling digitization project of various Archival, Rare, Fragile, Historical Document Scanning, with capacity and capability to handle projects of any any size and complexity

Historical Archive Scanning

eRecordsUSA, has been digitizing, such archival, rare materials for libraries, schools, universities, individuals, corporations, publishers, collectors, local city, county, and state government & organizations for over a decade. Our archival rare fragile book document scanning delivers digitization services to other imaging companies as a back end service provider.

We are the real deal ! Historical Archive Scanning includes hand written letters, post cards, books, journals, documents, drawings, artwork, maps, blueprints, newspapers, clippings, magazines, yearbooks, notes, films, slides, negatives, photos, photo albums, craft books, paintings etc.

The above hand written notebook journal from the year 1691, is just one example of one of the oldest historical media processed. With over a decade of experience, eRecordsUSA specializes in scanning Archival Rare, Fragile, Historic Books archival services of all types, sizes, and ages. We have the capacity to scan hundreds, sometimes thousands of image per day, ensuring you will receive your digitized versions of books scanned at archival quality, scan resolution and file formats meeting with your needs. Based on the eventual purpose  & customer requirements, we typically output scanned books to PDF files or TIFF,  JPEG image files. We can also fully provide searchable PDF files using top of the line OCR, optical recognition software.

A 100% audit of all the scanned pages to ensure no missing pages, page cropping, deskewing and capture of all content,  comes standard with all our deliverable. We also provide many additional services, if and when requested such as full audited extraction of content into editable word files, with human verification line by line into editable text file formats, bookmarking, indexing, data entry, table extractions, photo cropping, etc.  We work with many printers, publishers, librarians, archivists, genealogists, and content writers to assist them with our archival book scanning services.
  • We support many small & large business even many fortune 500 companies & government agencies.
  • Capacity & Capability & Experience to handle projects of any size and complexity.
  • We operate a state of the art conversion center in Fremont, CA, where all the work will be performed.
  • We use only the top of the line hardware and software to perform the Archival Book Scanning Projects.
  • Capacity to process thousands of images a day, including books, paper files & large drawings.
  • We have successfully completed every project to the entire satisfaction of our customers without exception.
  • We maintain a full “chain of custody”- from the time the files are pickup to the return of the original & scans.
  • Professional & Experienced Operators trained to handle delicate and fragile drawings.
  • Scan archival documents which includes Extremely large & over-sized books, large format Rare, Fragile, Historic Books . No Problem, We can help!

Feel free to reach out to us with any questions that you may have about your Archival Rare, Fragile, Document Scanning Project, or call us at 510.900.8800, Monday through Friday, between 8.00 am to 5.00 pm. Allow eRecordsUSA to assist you with Digitizing and preserving your precious books. Don’t forget to ask about our exiting & past clients, you will be amazed to hear about them.

See also  Should You Digitize Large, Rare Books?

Request for Quick Quote

Please complete the form below and we will be in touch shortly. Thank you.

We respect your privacy and will never share your email address or phone number with any unauthorised third parties.

    What Our Client Says

    •   needed one personal journal scanned - they were super responsive and did a great job of it!

      thumb Galina T.
      5/10/2025
    •   I contacted the eRecordsUSA team for a project scanning several dozen journals. I was a little nervous at first about shipping irreplaceable personal records for someone else to handle, but from the first call with Pankaj it was clear I was in excellent hands. From start to finish I've never experienced such thoughtful, responsive customer service, and the final color scans I received are sharp, accurate, and perfectly organized. I am thrilled to have over a decade of journals scanned and preserved so beautifully. eRecordsUSA will be my first call for any future digitizing needs.

      thumb Jenny G.
      4/23/2025
    •   Excellent digitization services! Swift email replies to any questions (usually within hours if not minutes).

      My three 300+ page hardback books were very professionally scanned into PDFs and they look stunning!

      thumb Joshua B.
      4/10/2025
    •   Pankaj and crew at eRecordsUSA did a beautiful job making scans of our old family archives that span four generations. Now I have thousands of neatly organized .pdf files with crisp & clear scans of my family's handwritten letters, photos, slides, and fragile documents from 100 years ago. I've been daydreaming about this project for over a decade, and I'm very grateful to now have it so successfully completed.

      thumb Brian S.
      2/25/2025
    •   I had an unusual requirement that involved scanning a 4' by 8' document on a roll. The staff did an excellent job capturing all the information, using several approaches to ensure the best reproduction. I'm grateful for the time the staff took to explain the options. I'm very pleased with the result.

      thumb Lawrence I.
      1/28/2025
    •   My experience with E-Records USA and their dedicated team was beyond reproach. They kindly hand held me through a long term project of digitizing every photo album, framed photo, and CD accumulated for over 30 years. They showed me what they could do back in 2022 and waited patiently until I was fully ready to make the project happen in 2024. I know they have many other clients, but I always felt like I was priority and important. They never shied away from all my questions, concerns, and fairly constant stream of emails. They patiently took me through the whole project and kept me updated informed at every step. This was not inexpensive, but the peace of mind I have that all our memories are now safely stored in a few places and can be accessed by my family at any time is worth it. And I freed up many, many boxes and therefore shelves full of bulky photo albums and framed pictures. It was something I had wanted to do for several years and I am so glad I found a company that was so trustworthy and caring about these invaluable memories. I would work with them in the future without question. They went above and beyond.

      thumb Joan L.
      11/16/2024
    •   They copied my 500 page family genealogy book and created a PDF file so that I can share with other family members. They did a wonderful job at a reasonable price.

      thumb Marty F.
      10/03/2024
    •   Had them digitize my grandmother's daily diary from 1912. It was in a bound journal. Files came out great. My cousins were thrilled to be able to read it. Was done in only a few short days.

      thumb Carolyn B.
      6/05/2024
    •   My family and I feel so fortunate to have found Pankaj and eRecords USA. We have dozens of family photo albums and with three siblings there wasn't going to be a good way to split them up. The photos were in albums with plastic sheet covers and many of them had writing on the back and/or on the side of the picture on the album itself. We wanted to preserve the handwriting and information about the photo and the actual photos.

      Before consulting with Pankaj my highest hope was to get the photos scanned. What he was able to do went above and beyond what I had hoped for. Not only did he create a PDF each album, preserving the order of the photos and all of the handwriting, but he then provided individual scans of every single photo AND the information on the back at a resolution quality that will allow us print the photos in the future. Not a single photo was damaged and some of them were in albums for over 70 years.

      I can't imagine the patience and perseverance it took to gently handle these hundreds of photos. In addition to the quality of the work, the communication, customer service, delivery times, accuracy of pricing and transparency of the process were top notch. We are so grateful to have these memories preserved for ourselves and future generations. Thank you Pankaj and team!

      thumb sarah k.
      6/01/2024
    •   I used their services to scan a book without damaging it. The scan was of very good quality, the book undamaged. I am very satisfied of the work done.

      thumb Maurizio B.
      5/28/2024