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.
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.
A few answers to the most commonly asked questions regarding preservation microfilming, digitization services, Advantage Archives, and our Community History Archives.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is time to reflect on the impact the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has had on this country. We learned about Dr. King in the classroom, through documentaries, watching Hollywood movies, on the web or in the countless books written about his life. These sources, when complimented with primary source materials, are invaluable to understanding the times in which he lived. To truly put his life into perspective, you need to look no further than your own community’s newspapers in the 50’s and 60’s.
Page 16 of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, published in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Tuesday, December 6th, 1955
Through clips and headlines from communities across the US, we can see how the newspaper media covered the great civil rights leader’s story from the mid-’50s until his death in 1968. Through editorials that illustrate the attitudes of intolerance that was prevalent in the day, and arguably remain today. The language and tone of the articles, and especially the editorials, clearly paint the picture of the inequality, racism, and bigotry in this period of our nations history. While some of it is uncomfortable to read, it is important that we view these events as they happened. This is by no means a comprehensive list of the events and accomplishments of Dr. King, but rather a sampling of moments and the community’s reactions to them.
Although his accomplishments later in life would help define the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. clearly understood the need for change as early as 17 years old. As a student attending Morehouse College, he felt compelled to write a letter to the Atlantic Constitution, following the 1946 lynchings of 5 African Americans in Georgia. The letter, headlined “Kick Up Dust”, centered on the same themes he would crusade for throughout his life: “We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens: The right to earn a living at work for which we are fitted by training and ability; equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote; equality before the law; some of the same courtesy and good manners that we ourselves bring to all human relations. ”
Kick Up Dust
“I often find when decent treatment for the Negro is urged, a certain class of people hurry to raise the scarecrow of social mingling and intermarriage. These questions have nothing to do with the case. And most people who kick up this kind of dust know that it is simple dust to obscure the real question of rights and opportunities…”.
M.L. King, JR.
Page 1 of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, published in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Friday, December 21st, 1956
In 1955 King entered the national spotlight when the 26 year old organized the Montgomery bus boycott. The headlines illustrated the fierce anger and nationalism of the white population over his actions and growing popularity. However, his efforts against segregation in 1955, prompted the United States Supreme Court to issue a ruling to desegregate busses.
In 1958, Reverend King suffered an attack from an unlikely assailant. Izola Ware Curry, the black daughter of sharecroppers, suffering from mental illness, stabbed King in the chest with a letter opener while he was reading a copy of his own book “Stride Towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story”. He would make a full recovery and later recount this story in the famous “Mountaintop” sermon, the last he would deliver before his death in ’68.
Dr. King believed strongly in the non-violent demonstration to protest the injustices around him. His strong convictions and faith helped drive him forward. He traveled to India in 1959 to learn about the ways of Gandhi and the non-violent civil disobedience that defined his legacy.
In the tumultuous times of the 60’s, MLK would continue to build a legacy of his own. As he had become the face of the Civil Rights movement, the world’s gaze was turned towards him. He was well aware that his actions, and those he led, were under a microscope.
The chasm between those who revered him, and those who despised him, was deep and wide. It seemed unbridgeable and growing. As anger gave way to even more violence, Dr.King implored all those who felt oppressed not to resort to violence, as it would fuel the rhetoric of those who spoke against them, and would be be met in kind.
However, the black community continued to be the victims of violence, blind hatred and increasing hostility in the mid-60s.
We encourage you to explore your own community’s history, and share with us what you have discovered. Each city, county, and state had their own perspective, and it is important we continue to learn from one another.
Other News!
Check out our latest blogs posts and articles from this category!
The Advantage Team is hopping on a boat and heading down the Mississippi to New Orleans (not literally, since “shipping” seems to take forever these days). The city of Jazz, colorful buildings, Mardi Gras, and French Beignets, New Orleans has plenty to offer for visitors. As a digital archive company, we naturally will place a […]
Stop Booth 832 at LLX 2023! Advantage Archives will be in booth 832 on January 27th-30th at the LibLearnX conference. This will be our first year attending this show, and we are excited to exhibit. LibLearnX will offer innovative session design concepts on the program to help you learn, network, and find solutions. Participants can […]
The Coe College archive contains a wide variety of content, including yearbooks from 1903-2007 and newspapers from 1899-2013. Coe College was founded by Presbyterian minister Williston Jones in 1851. The college is located in Cedar Rapids, IA, and has an undergraduate enrollment of over 1,300 students. “The Coe College archive is a great tool for […]
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