Advantage Archives partners with community leaders to provide free digital access to local history. Advantage has recently reached the milestone of 118,000,000+ images with 100,000,000 (not IP, or UN/PW restricted) free for anyone to access.
Since the formation of Advantage Archives, we have been partnering with communities to provide free digital access to local history. We built the Community History Archives platform with a few goals in mind; to provide FREE access to local history, and not restrict the type of documents that the Community History Archive can host (Ex. Yearbooks, Newspapers, Bound Volumes, Photographic Material, City Directories). We have partnered with nearly 1,000 communities and have a total of 118,000,000+ historical images preserved with 100,000,000 freely available to the public. We cannot, however, take all the credit for this accomplishment. We must take the time to thank each partner, who over the years have helped us achieve this goal. We are so thankful to provide each community with their own archive that is free to the public, with no subscription fees. We thank you all for your continued support and partnerships.
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Whether the archive has 1,000 or 1,000,000 historical images, they all accomplish the goal of providing local communities with free access to their history. We know that our partners work hard to provide their patrons with access to historical content.
“Some of the collections are small, but others have over 50 different newspaper titles. Although Advantage Archives gets the credit for making these available, much of the credit should go to the individual libraries, library systems, historical societies, [universities], and other institutions, who do the really hard work of obtaining the funds via grants and other funding sources to digitize these old newspapers and make them available online for their patrons. In these times where funding for the digitization of old newspapers from libraries, archives, and other institutions is not easy to get, those of us who want to research our genealogy through newspapers and other documents owe a large debt of gratitude to the librarians and archivists who make all this possible. The moral of the story is “Support your local libraries and archives!” “ – Ken Marks (The Ancestor Hunt)
The Community History Archives are user-friendly and easy to learn. The Advantage team has focused on making it as simple as possible so that everyone…from students to grandparents (and everyone in between) can browse, search, view, clip, and share articles, headlines, pages, and stories recorded in the pages of their local history. Users of the site are able to just type a search and hit “enter” or create a more complex search by using the query builder. There is also the ability to simply browse to a specific year, month, day, or page in any (or all) publications contained in the archive.
