A ground source heat pump (GSHP) system was designed and constructed in Minhang archives of Shanghai. As a demonstration project, it is the first archives to use a GSHP system in China. The system consists of two heat pumps with the rated cooling capacity of 500 kW for each and 280 boreholes with 80 m in depth. In the cooling mode, the heat extraction from the condenser of the heat pump was divided: part of it was rejected to the soil while the rest was used to reheat the air in air handling units. The GSHP system has continuously run for nearly two years. It was shown that the indoor thermal environment met the "Archives Design Code" issued by China national archives. Compared with an air source heat pump system which is widely used in archives buildings, the operating cost of the GSHP system is reduced by 55.8% and the payback time is about two years. Owing to its great potential in energy conservation, such kind of GSHP system is testified to be applicable to the air-conditioning systems of the archives buildings. Besides, the applications of GSHP systems corresponding to different climatic zones of China were analyzed. (C) 2011 Elsevier By. All rights reserved.