Heritage Microfilm Partners With Google to Provide Digital Newspapers

Cedar Rapids, Iowa (PRWEB) October 2, 2008--Heritage Microfilm and NewspaperARCHIVE.com have formed a partnership with Google to bring more digitized newspaper pages to the Web.

Heritage Microfilm will serve as a Google digitization partner, working with newspaper publishers worldwide. Publishers can continue to take advantage of Heritage's current subscription model while at the same time working with Google to extend the reach of their brand online, as well as earn ad revenue. Publishers who wish to be excluded from this partnership will still receive the same high-quality service they are accustomed to.

"Heritage Microfilm prides itself on strong relationships with its clients," said Mike Willard, brand director for Heritage Microfilm. "As the Google initiative expands, we will work with clients to explore and identify the opportunities that make the most sense for their business."

This exciting arrangement will greatly expand the current historic content accessible through both the Google News Archive interface and the NewspaperARCHIVE.com website.

This arrangement will not, however, change the existing model of microfilming newspapers for archival and preservation reasons. Conversely, this partnership reinforces the importance of microfilm - much of the historical newspapers which now appear online would have been lost long ago without it. Microfilm continues to be the only viable option for preservation of printed text, and Heritage Microfilm remains committed to excellence in preservation.

Heritage Microfilm and NewspaperARCHIVE.com will continue to branch out from a core newspaper microfilming organization and online database in refreshingly innovative directions. For example, Heritage Microfilm will soon announce a focused 5-year international initiative, enhancing existing partnerships and welcoming new ones. This enterprise is aimed at increasing the availability of foreign news and history to people everywhere.

"This is a huge opportunity for everyone involved," said Jeffrey Kiley, General Manager for Heritage Microfilm. "Internet researchers will be able to find never-before-available history, our publishing clients will have a beneficial business model, and we will help advance the technology and bring this resource to millions."

NewspaperARCHIVE.com, already the world's largest digital newspaper archive, has recently launched a broad array of free topic-driven content (http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Topics.aspx), with a focus on user-generated articles and shared research. With new subject areas for genealogists (http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Genealogists.aspx), writers (http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Writers.aspx), teachers (http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Teachers.aspx) and more, the content array features a host of tips for searching, authoring and publishing articles on a number of topics, including academic syllabi.

"We are exploring a variety of other ideas and partnerships to increase the ways in which our users can manipulate our newspaper archives," said Chris Murders, brand director for NewspaperARCHIVE.com. "Empowering our customers to use our newspapers to create new and unique content - such as blogs, galleries, family histories and life-stories - is our primary goal at NewspaperARCHIVE.com."

The partnership with Google is effective immediately.

About Heritage Microfilm, Inc.

Heritage Microfilm, Inc., of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a major archival microfilm and digitization company. Heritage Microfilm was founded in 1997 and quickly became one of the premier newspaper preservation vendors in North America. Heritage Microfilm maintains a humidity and temperature-controlled storage facility holding hundreds of thousands of reels of master microfilm and is a certified Kodak ImageGuard? Lab. They work with tens of thousands of newspaper publishers and libraries throughout the world.

In 1999, Heritage Microfilm launched the brand NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the world's largest historical newspaper database online. NewspaperARCHIVE.com contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1759 to present, spanning almost 3,000 newspaper titles and 762 cities. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date making it easy to quickly explore historical content. Anyone interested in finding more information about Heritage Microfilm and NewspaperARCHIVE.com can visit Heritage Microfilm (http://www.heritagemicrofilm.com) or NewspaperARCHIVE.com (http://www.newspaperarchive.com).

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