At Advantage Archives, we continually evaluate our digitization methods, focusing on improving quality while maintaining affordability for our partners. As technology has evolved, so has our approach to digitizing microfilm, newspapers, and historical documents. While many of our earlier projects featured bitonal images, technological advancements, strategic partnerships, and reduced costs have allowed us to refine our processes.
As a result, capturing content with either a greyscale or color output has become our standard practice. With 256 shades of grey between black and white, or over 16 million colors, both options provide more detail, enhanced readability, and improved accessibility that was previously only available to those who were willing (or able) to pay a premium.
Scanning historical collection materials in greyscale has long been the standard for initiatives such as the National Digital Newspaper Project, Chronicling America, and various academic or cultural heritage archives. This approach has also been the standard fare of digital archive subscription services and for-profit businesses that monetize such content. Unfortunately, many public libraries and small to mid-size institutions have found it challenging to justify the costs associated with digitizing, storing, hosting, and managing the technical demands of larger file sizes.
Advantage Archives, however, has consistently aimed to provide scalable solutions that align with the funding available to our partners. This approach has enabled communities nationwide to offer free and practical access to local history. Our company is built on the foundation of establishing strong, meaningful community-based partnerships. Our role in these partnerships is to efficiently and affordably digitize historical content and provide free access solutions, including storing and hosting the archives.
With over 1,000 partners across the nation and new archives launching monthly, it is crucial to employ innovative and cost-effective strategies to keep project costs low and access free. Until recently, bitonal digitization was the most cost-effective solution compared to the more expensive greyscale or color options. However, the industry has evolved, and the pricing gap between bitonal and greyscale has significantly narrowed, making full-color scanning more affordable. As technology has advanced, we have gradually transitioned more of our partners to greyscale and color image archives while adhering to our principles of budget-friendly solutions. This has been our standard for the past two years and will continue to be our approach moving forward.
Digitization provides a practical means for creating access to historical collections, but the method chosen can significantly impact the quality and utility of the digital archives. Bitonal, greyscale, and full-color digitization each offer unique advantages and are suited to different materials and purposes. However, in the past, price often dictated the method of capture more so than other considerations.
These days cost no longer plays a disproportionate role in influencing the decision on how to scan the collection. Understanding the differences between the digitization methods has allowed us to balance considerations of storage, accessibility, and cost to provide our partners with the most value.
Historically, bitonal (black-and-white) imaging was the standard due to its cost-effectiveness and smaller file sizes. Bitonal imaging captures only two colors: black and white. These files require less storage space, making them easier to manage and faster to process. For many years, this method was favored for its practicality.
However, bitonal imaging has its drawbacks. The primary disadvantage is the loss of detail. Subtle features such as faded text, light pencil marks, and intricate illustrations can be lost in the stark contrast of black and white. This reduction in detail can obscure important information and make documents harder to read and interpret. Moreover, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which converts images of text into searchable and editable data, performs less effectively on bitonal images. The lack of detail often results in higher rates of misinterpreted characters and words, diminishing the utility of digitized documents.
Despite these limitations, bitonal digitization can be suitable for typeset documents with clear, high-contrast text where the primary goal is to create a large volume of searchable text quickly and affordably. However, now that there are affordable solutions for greyscale and color, newspapers and other historical holdings benefit from moving away from the monochromatic format.
Greyscale imaging captures a spectrum of shades between black and white, providing a richer and more detailed representation of documents. This method significantly enhances image quality by preserving the original material’s nuances. Subtle features, such as faded ink and light pencil marks, are retained, making documents more readable and interpretable.
The increased detail in greyscale images also improves OCR performance. Greyscale provides a much better source for OCR software, leading to more accurate text recognition and reducing errors. This makes the documents more useful for search and analysis.
Additionally, greyscale digitization allows for higher resolution, crucial for examining fine details and small text. Researchers, historians, and genealogists benefit greatly from the ability to zoom in on specific areas without losing clarity.
Greyscale digitization is ideal for historical newspapers and documents that contain a mix of text and illustrations, faded ink, or handwritten notes. It balances the need for detail and fidelity with manageable file sizes and costs.
Full-color imaging captures a document’s complete range of colors, providing the most accurate representation of the original. This is ideal for materials where color plays a significant role, such as maps, illustrations, and photos.
The detail and color contrast in full-color images result in superior quality; however, they require significantly more storage space and are historically associated with higher costs.
Full-color digitization is best suited for documents where color is integral to understanding the content, such as modern newspapers with color photos, maps, or documents with significant color annotations. It provides the highest fidelity and ensures that every aspect of the original document is preserved.
As technology advanced over the last few years, greyscale and full-color digitization have become more accessible and affordable…with an emphasis on the “affordable” part. We are committed to providing a solution that fits within any budget, even if the budget is somewhat restrictive or funding options are limited. We have held off on making the transition away from bitonal digitization until we were comfortable with our partners receiving the best quality at the lowest price possible.
With the significant decrease in the cost of storage and bandwidth and the rapid increase in processing power and speed, handling and storing larger file sizes has become far more manageable. These trends in technology allow us to offer improved image quality at high volumes with a low cost-per-project, enhancing our digitization services and making them more accessible and affordable.
Storage technology has seen remarkable advancements. Over the last decade, the cost per gigabyte of storage has plummeted while speed and capacity have soared. The price for high-capacity hard drives was significantly higher and what once cost over $0.20 per GB now costs less than $0.02, and SSDs have become more affordable, making high-speed storage more accessible.
Additionally, cloud-based storage solutions have become more cost-effective and scalable, further reducing the costs associated with storing large volumes of digital data.
From 2014 to 2024, the cost of internet services and bandwidth has significantly decreased, making it more feasible to manage larger file sizes associated with high-quality digitization methods. For instance, the price per megabit for internet services dropped drastically, from $9.01 per Mbps in 2014 to $0.64 per Mbps in 2024.
Moreover, the cost of internet services has been relatively stable, with prices decreasing by about 13.17% annually from 1997 to 2024, despite overall inflation. These cost reductions, coupled with advancements in technology that have dramatically increased available speeds, enable us to offer richer, more detailed digital archives without imposing prohibitive expenses on our partners.
Processing performance has skyrocketed in the last five years without a comparable increase in cost. This trend has enabled us to transition from bitonal to greyscale and full-color digitization, capturing richer detail and improving accessibility without incurring prohibitive costs.
Twenty years ago, our computing capabilities were like riding a horse – dependable but slow and limited in capacity. Ten years ago, we advanced to cars – significantly faster and able to handle more. Five years ago, we moved to trains – powerful and efficient, capable of transporting heavy loads swiftly. Today, we are flying jets because modern processors are more than twice as powerful as those from the last few years.
In the past, institutions often faced the challenge of balancing quality, quantity, and budget when planning digitization projects. I frequently referred to it as the “three-legged stool” and cautioned against emphasizing one leg over the others. Doing so made the stool unstable, resulting in a project that was either too costly, insufficient in scope, or lacking in quality.
Today, the need to compromise between quality, quantity, and budget has diminished. Advancements in storage technology, processing power, and OCR capabilities have made it possible to achieve high-quality digitization at a more affordable cost.
This progress enables institutions to provide detailed, accurate digital representations of their collections without sacrificing volume or budget. At Advantage Archives, we leverage these technological advancements to offer our partners the best possible digitization solutions. Our approach ensures that every project, whether using bitonal, greyscale, or full-color digitization, meets the highest standards of quality while remaining cost-effective and efficient.
By opting for greyscale and full-color digitization, we ensure that every document is captured in its full glory, offering an unparalleled resource for researchers, historians, and the public alike. This shift underscores our dedication to making history as accessible and accurate as possible for future generations.
Explore the “Read All About It” archives to read stories that spotlight our partners and their communities, announcements from our team, updates on current projects, and so much more. Discover articles about engagement, outreach, primary sources, community, digitization, education, and other topics of interest. Delve into the happenings in this week in history and take a deep dive into the events and people who helped shape our communities, our nation, and the world.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye, READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Advantage Archives works to build strong, community-based partnerships to provide free online access to local history, making it discoverable and easily accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time, on any device. This allows communities to understand and connect to their past in a meaningful way. Through the Community History Archive search platform, we provide the community with the means to explore, discover, learn from, connect with, and share the stories of the people, places, and events that shaped their community.
The Community History Archives are intended to serve as a “portal to the past”, allowing local primary source documents to give an accounting of history as told by the individuals that witnessed it. Advantage Archives guiding principals center around building strong community-based partnerships, which is why we enter into them with the intent of shouldering our fair share and taking the burden off of the community for the ongoing costs associated with storage, hosting, development, and maintenance of the Community’s History Archive. We are an active participant in the community’s efforts to make their collective history more accessible. The Community History Archives are maintained for free by Advantage and do not require a subscription, seat license, annual support contract, or any other ongoing costs or expenses to the institution or members of the community.
If you would like to see more local history online, please contact your local library, newspaper publisher, genealogical society, historical society, or educational institution, and encourage them to learn more about creating a Community History Archive or have them contact Advantage Archives at (855) 303-2727
