We welcome diaries whether they are in bound volumes, notebooks or on loose paper and ask only that you not alter them in any way (e.g., get them bound/re-bound) before donating them. We prefer original diaries and these can be donated to the University of Guelph Archival and Special Collections.  If your family is reluctant to part with the originals the Rural Diary Archive project would be happy to accept transcripts or copies of the originals. These transcriptions or copies would be digitized, catalogued, and housed in the Rural Diary Archive project’s digital storage site. If you have a family tree, autobiography, accompanying photographs, or other papers that relate to the diarist, please consider donating them too. We greatly value any basic biographical information that you can provide on the diarist.

Though the website features diaries from nineteenth-century Ontario, we accept those from other eras and areas of Canada.