Advantage Archives Announces New Chief Technology Officer

Advantage Archives would like to introduce our new CTO, Mike Schmitz. Mike joins the company at a moment when Advantage Archives is poised to transform the Community History Archive online portal into a more powerful, robust, and easy-to-use search platform. Additionally, Mike will tackle the challenges of expanding the company’s digitization and indexing capacity while maintaining exceptional results.

“My passion for digital librarianship took root twenty years ago in the first role of my career. I was a part of a team that built searchable digital libraries, “in-a-box”, for installation in under served communities around the world. I am honored to join the Advantage Archives team and continue the great work of both preserving history and providing free access that can be as easy as pulling out a smartphone. I look forward to working with the Advantage Archives team using an approach that places our partners and the end-user in the center of every solution we design.”

~Mike Schmitz, CTO Advantage Archives

CEDAR RAPIDS, IA — Advantage Archives is a company founded on three key values, Community, Partnership, and Engagement. Advantage has been building partnerships for the last few decades and continues to provide these partners with a FREE digital portal (the Community History Archive) with all their local history. Mike Schmitz brings his 20+ years of Technology experience to Advantage, providing an important addition to the team. Mike has previous experience in leadership roles in software engineering, user experience design, and product design; Mike is uniquely qualified to deliver solutions that put the customer and user experience first.

Advantage promises to take the steps required to develop lasting relationships in communities. Our responsibility of providing free digital access to local history is as important now as ever. Advantage continues to develop the Community History Archives platform, and having Mike at the head of this project will ensure the platform is as user-friendly and powerful as possible. Mike’s passion in product development, application development, and web design is exactly what the Advantage Team needed. A crucial role at Advantage Archives.

Since joining, Mike has brought a wealth of knowledge and experience that has been a major advantage for the company and our partners.

We recently completed upgrades to the back end of our system under Mike’s purview. This improved performance and responsiveness of the Community History Archives as a result, as well as added redundancy to reduce the risk of downtime. How much of a difference has this made? Since the upgrades on 9/12/2022, our sites have had 99.99% uptime. You can read Mike’s bio here.

“The addition of the CTO role is part of our commitment to our partners and creating the best possible experience for them in the Community History Archives. It will help us ensure the CHAs are a useful tool to increase engagement in their community, and the best way to allow their patrons to view their local history.”

~Chris Donohue, CFO Advantage Archives