Old archery books still contain a lot of useful information. They are hard to find and often very expensive. This site is dedicated to preserving them by creating an online repository for the benefit of all archers and as a record of passed times of archery.

The library started when the maintainer thought it could be interesting to put some books from his collection online of which the copyright had expired.

The Library is a non-profit site. The proceedings from advertisement go towards purchase of new books and hosting costs.

This site only contains texts of which copyright has expired. The server is based in The Netherlands. As such, governing law is the law of the European Union. Additionaly, Dutch law (Auteurswet 1912) is applicable.

These laws specify that 70 years after an author's death, his or her work becomes public domain. Additionaly, there is a specification of the "shorter term" which states that if copyright has expired in another country, this copyright is not extended. In this context, works published in the U.S.A before 1923 are in the public domain, as U.S. law states that copyright expired on any work published before 1923.

The books and articles included in this site are in the public domain but the texts and files on this site aren't. Although the words in the publications are not copyrighted or constitute new work, the files on this site do. They are a result of much work: acquiring the books, scanning, optical character recognition (OCR), spell checking and HTML-edtiting. That is why it is not permitted to use the texts from this site for any purpose without prior written permission from the maintainer.

If a book is available in the printed version, the books are scanned manually. Initially, a flatbed scanner was used. This is a labour intensive process and not beneficial for the condition of the books, as much stress is put on the spine.
As digital the resolution of digital photographic cameras became higher and prices came down, later a digital camera was used. This enables faster image acquisition and less stress on the books. Only the images are still scanned on a flatbed scanner.

Sometimes books are already available in digital format. Depending on the format, they are either converted using OCR or edited in a word-processor

After obtaining the images an OCR-program is used to convert the images into text. The text is then corrected and formatted in a word-processor. These files are then converted into HTML.

The original paragraphs are maintained, as wel as the italics in the text. There may be spelling mistakes and even omissions so, if you do find a typing/scanning mistake, or if you suspect that something is not correct, please let me know. Please, do notice that the original spelling might be somewhat different than today.

If you would like to donate a book to the archery library, this is most welcome.

If you wish, you can send us a book and we will process it, returning it to you if desired. You do not need to actually send us the book if you do not want. If you have a scanner or digital camera, you can digitize the pages and send them to us for further processing. If you want to process the book yourself, we will be happy to assist you.

Financial donations are not requested, as this may involve costly transaction fees and have tax implications for the maintainer.