Our services

In-house services

We are located in Prince Edward County; map and driving instructions are available. Entry is free for everyone (occasional exceptions are made for special events) but we do encourage membership. Advance notification for large groups is appreciated, please contact us.

Located on the Canadian shores of Lake Ontario, our facilities are open during normal hours all year round. We welcome visitors, but would encourage you to become a Member and enjoy the full facilities of our reading room area on the main floor, the second floor and our gardens.

Most of our documents, books, magazines, charts, etc are available for consultation either immediately or at very short notice (some older documents are subject to handling restrictions) and limited copying services are available subject to certain copyright restrictions.

If you are unable to visit the Society's reading room and research centre, we may be able to carry out some research on your behalf. Members will receive some assistance free of charge, other visitors (and members wishing to develop projects beyond a certain quantity of research involvement) may be charged additional fees.

We are primarily a volunteer-driven organization, and if you do have some spare time, we would truly appreciate adding you to the team. For details, pleas see our volunteer page.

On-line services

Our main catalogue (international library OPAC or Online Public Access Catalogue) currently contains about seventy thousand books. Our volunteers and staff continuously add more items – books, journals, magazines, charts, artwork, etc – so please enquire if you don't find what you are looking for.

Our Ships database is online to assist researchers. It contains mostly Canadian ships, and its 132,000 entries were compiled from multiple sources including Tom Tumilty's shipwreck research and the Canadian Heritage Information Network's previous heritage list. We wish to thank all contributors, and look forward to improving and expanding it.

Our de-accessioned (surplus) holdings are available for sale, and you can access our secure web page for payments online. You may also wish to refer to our pages concerning bibliographic terms and art print terminology.

We also make many of our surplus books available through Biblio which is our preferred on-line bookstore.

We also make available a worldwide book search page for new and used titles, as well as a utility to deal with ISBN changes to 13 digits.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further details.