We’re happy to bring you some Erie County NY material. While it was originally provided on our Erie County Directory CD-ROM, which, along with all the rest of our CDs, was discontinued, it has been unavailable long enough to qualify as “new” we think.
Without further ado, here is the “new” Erie County NY material:
The Saga yearbook for 1957 from Clarence High School in Clarence, New York.
The Gateway yearbook for 1954 for the Frontier Central School in Hamburg, New York.
The Erie County Directory for 1924. Note that this is real Erie County NY material, not Buffalo material and not Tonawanda material (neither of those cities are included in this directory. It appears they were published as separate directories shortly after this Erie County directory was published.
Some picture of antique postcards of Erie County and Buffalo. We had included these times from our collection on the CD-ROM, and we hated to see them go to waste. (You’ll see one of them below)
At any rate, all this Erie County NY material is available at a significant savings over what we charged for the CD-ROM, and you get to pay for only what you want, not everything we previously included in the CD.
Take a look at our Erie County page in any event. We now have a fair amount of material that may be of interest if Erie County history is of interest to you.
Back in August we made the momentous “CD closeout” decision — that we would discontinue selling our historical and genealogical CD-ROMs, and gradually migrate the contents of our CDs to downloads.
Well, it’s been happening! We’ve eliminated around a dozen of our CDs as the inventory sold out, and we’re making progress migrating their contents to download format.
There have been three positive results of the CD closeout so far:
–A number of smaller, less significant publications that were once lurking on CDs with little publicity are now available as individual downloads — with their own catalog entries. People can actually find them! Eventually they may even show up on Google!
–We’ve saved time and money. When you deal with physical inventory — creating the CDs, reproducing them, maintaining the inventory, and shipping them — you spend more time, effort, and money than one would think. The net result is that we have more time to spend finding more historical and genealogical material and making it available to you.
–Our customers have saved time, money, and helped avoid clutter. Saved money? Yes! When we discontinued our Canaan, CT CD ($20) we replaced it with three downloads. If you bought all three, you would barely spend half that. And we doubt many people will buy all three. The clutter speaks for itself — we never devised a perfect way for storing CDs of our own so we could find things when we needed them, and it’s easy to store downloads on your hard drive. And time: we figure that it costs us two or three minutes each time we need to put a CD in and wait for it to crank up, and then to go through it to find what we want, and we suspect it was wasting your time too. Furthermore, downloads arrive instantaneously. CDs come by postal mail. Enough said about that!
But still
We do have some CDs left in inventory. We’ll continue to sell them until they’re gone. Here’s what left:
If one of these matches your research interests, we do advise you to act now. Once the CDs are gone, the material on them goes into the queue awaiting republication as downloads. There, they vie for priority with the new material we’re working our way through, so it could be a year or more before material on a discontinued CD is again available. A word to the wise should be sufficient!
As always, thanks to our faithful customers. It’s you whom we do this for, and even as the CD closeout continues, it’s your needs we try to satisfy. We try never to forget that.