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About Advantage Archives

We work to digitize history to make it discoverable and easily accessible, allowing communities to understand and connect to their past in a meaningful way. Our Mission is the long-term preservation of the past as told by the individuals that witnessed it.

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Our Team

Our Team at Advantage Archives has years of experience in the business of preservation. Our team has what it takes to develop a long-term partnership and provide a quality preservation solution for your community. This isn’t our occupation; it is our passion.

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Read All About It!

Extra! Extra! Read All About It! Our Blog Features Spotlights, Tips & Tricks, Interesting Finds, Articles Of Interest, Updates, And Much More.

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Frequently Asked Questions

A few answers to the most commonly asked questions regarding preservation microfilming, digitization services, Advantage Archives, and our Community History Archives.

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Partner With Advantage

We look forward to learning more about you, your organization, and your community, and look forward to exploring the possibilites of a partnership. Together we can preserve and provide access to your local history.

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Free Digital Archive Hosting

Connect your community to it's past with a Community History Archive. These free digital archives provide practical access to your community's history, from anywhere, at any time, on any device.

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Microfilm Digitization

Patrons that visit your institution will have a powerful tool that can save time by searching through your community’s history by name, date range, keywords, publication, or location…and not limited to a reel at a time, or if a microfilm reader is occupied (or operational!). Advantage Preservation offers a user-friendly digital solution to research your materials via our Community History Archives hosted solution.

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Document Digitization

Printed, handwritten, and even drawn content contained in the city, county, state, personal, and even business documents provide invaluable insight into the people, places, events, and accounts in a “snapshot of time”.

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Digitization Of Historical Books and Bound Volumes

Our advanced imaging equipment, innovative post-processing methodologies, and years of experience ensure that the content contained in your history books, journals, bound newspaper volumes, ledgers, scrapbooks, and other collated paper documents is never lost to age, deterioration, fading, ripped, and torn pages, broken bindings, or skin oils and other contaminants.

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Digitization Of Yearbooks and Annuals

Digitizing yearbooks creates a portal to your community’s past! Alumni, genealogists, or anyone that is looking to relive their youth can search and browse the faces, names, and memories contained in the pages of your community’s school yearbooks.

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Digitization Of Photographic Materials

Digitization ensures that your photographs, negatives, or slides can be viewed anytime, anywhere, from any device, allowing you to relive those moments in the community through pictures of the people, places, and events that shaped your community and will enable you to share those moments with others.

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Digitization Of Maps, Atlases, And Land Records

Our purpose-built, high-resolution large format scanners and our sophisticated two-camera digital imaging systems allow us to capture your maps and other large-format documents, as well as historical atlases, land records, plats, or other bound volumes in a non-destructive manner, providing the best possible image quality.

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Preservation Microfilming

Preserving our cultural heritage often falls to local communities and groups, with a small staff and even smaller budgets. Cities, counties, and community organizations collect records, vital statistics, and transactional data that, over the years, tells the story of an era.

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Information Management Solutions

Document imaging services and document scanning services from Advantage Information Management Solutions include indexing and online document hosting.

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Libraries & Historical Societies

The Advantage Archives team has been partnering with community libraries, library systems, historical societies, and other cultural institutions to preserve and provide practical digital access to their community’s printed history. We want to help your institution put history at the fingertips of anyone interested and connect the members of your community to their past in a very tangible and meaningful way.

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Government Agencies

Advantage Archives has been partnering with Government Agencies across the country. We can preserve and digitize all the documents housed within your organization. We know that many of these documents and books are extremely fragile, so we handle these documents with extreme care. Not only do our services ensure that these records never are damaged, but it also eases workflow, and allows you to publish certain records on your website for public access.

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Museums And Cultural Institutions

Advantage Archives is a proud partner of Museums and Cultural Intuitions across the country with a partnership. Our Mission is to preserve the past, making it Accessible today, ensuring it has a future. That is why we feel that our partnerships are so significant to each other.

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Genealogical Societies

Advantage Archives is proud partners with Genealogical Societies across the country. With a partnership between Advantage and your agency, we can bring forgotten stories back to life and viewable to the public. Together we can create a partnership that will allow someone to piece together their family tree.

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Churches and Religious Organizations

Advantage Archives is proud to partner with Churches across the country. Churches have an abundance of essential records that must be preserved to last forever. At Advantage, we specialize in ensuring each of these documents live forever. No matter the document, it is crucial.

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Educational Institutions

We work with educational institutions of all sizes, both public and private and we understand the importance of the services they provide their students, their community, their state, and beyond. We have partnered with these college & university libraries, K-12 schools, & other educational organizations to provide digitization of school newspapers, yearbooks, programs, alumni records, and more, as well as digital access solutions.

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Newspaper Publishers

Newspaper publishers have recorded their community’s “first draft of history” every day. We preserve that history, on microfilm, and partner with the publisher to make that preserved content widely available to not only the libraries and institutions in their community but to the community as a whole. It is your community, so we ensure it is accessible for all. The service will be done at no cost to our qualifying publishing partners.

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Commercial Markets

Advantage Information Management System is dedicated to providing solutions to industries and government agencies everywhere. Businesses large and small value their partnership with Advantage, as much as we value ours with them. Archiving and retrieving information may not be your core competency, but it is ours. We listen to your needs and requirements and design a solution specific to your organizations and those you serve.

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Protecting Your Past, Preserving Your Future: The Importance of Backup Strategy

Preserve, Protect, Refresh: Best Practices for Digital Archive Backups

Ensuring long-term access to your Community History Archive requires reliable digital archive backups.

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Preserving your community’s history is a shared priority. While your collection is available online via your Community History Archive, it’s just one piece of a broader strategy to ensure long-term data protection and retrievability. Many of our partners have received either a Solid State Drive (SSD) or a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) as a physical deliverable when their digital collection was completed. These drives serve as fast, portable access points and critical secondary backups alongside the online CHA. While typically stored in a read-only state, they require periodic maintenance, review, and eventual replacement to ensure ongoing data integrity.

Understanding the Limits of USB-Based Drives

Storage devices have defined life spans:

  • HDDs: 3–5 years of reliable use; susceptible to wear due to mechanical parts
  • SSDs: 5–10 years depending on conditions; better durability, but still vulnerable to unpowered data degradation

Even unused, drives can suffer from bit rot, corruption, or silent failure. That’s why we recommend replacing any drive over five years old—even if it appears to be functioning—to prevent data loss in your digital archive backups.

Best Practice: Review your external drive every 1–2 years and replace every 5 years.

Environmental Conditions Matter

Long-term media storage demands controlled conditions. To extend drive life, store them at:

  • Temperature: 60–75°F
  • Humidity: 35–55% relative humidity
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A stable environment is critical for digital media longevity

Our Recommended Multi-Layered Strategy

At Advantage Archives, we recommend a three-part preservation model for digital archive backups:

  1. Online CHA access – your cloud-based, always-on repository
  2. An on-site backup drive – refreshed every 5 years
  3. Archival-grade M-DISCs stored in our FIRELOCK® media vault

M-DISCs are write-once, archival-quality discs that resist environmental damage and don’t suffer the same degradation as HDDs or SSDs. Our secure vault, engineered with ceramic insulation and magnetic shielding, offers unmatched protection against fire, heat, moisture, and more, enhancing your digital archive backups.

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Our FIRELOCK vault ensures preservation-grade protection

Migration Services You Can Trust

If your external drive is approaching its expiration window, we provide full migration support, including:

  • Verifying file structure and naming conventions
  • Validating metadata (publication, date, location, etc.)
  • Ensuring equity between generated and delivered files
  • Preparing and exporting files as multipage PDFs

Whether you want to replace your drive, incorporate M-DISCs, or store backups in our secure vault, we’ll ensure your digitized history is protected—today and for the future.

Your history deserves a future-proof backup strategy. Let us help make that happen.

Contact us to refresh your drive, explore our vault services, or ask how we can support your long-term access plan with digital archive backups.

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Other News!

Check out our latest blogs posts and articles from this category!

September 10, 2025
Partner Spotlight: Marion Independent School District (Iowa)

Partner Spotlight: Marion Independent School District (Iowa) Preserving local educational heritage with Advantage Archives The Marion Independent School District archive spans more than a century of student life and community history. Archive Overview Marion Independent School District (MISD), in partnership with Advantage Archives, offers a robust digital archive accessible via library premises and at marionisd.historyarchives.online. […]

September 02, 2025
This Week in History- September 1st – September 7th

Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, caused a controversy that grew beyond the scope of football. Kaepernick had been sitting on the bench during the national anthem for the 2016 pre-season games. His actions were a form of peaceful protest sparked by the killings of multiple black men that summer, joining a […]

August 25, 2025
This Week in History- August 25th Through 31st

Hurricane Katrina was one of the most destructive hurricanes to hit the Gulf Coast in the 21st century. On August 28, 2005, a day before the storm reached Louisiana, it intensified to a Category 5 storm, with sustained winds at times reaching 145 mph. The next day, Katrina brought devastating winds and floods to the […]

Bring The Past Into The Present!

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