Newspaper Publishers
Publishers across the United States have joined Advantage’s efforts to ensure that their community can connect with their past and that the community’s history is available in the future. Advantage works to bring the local library, museum, or school together with the newspaper publisher and other community leaders and like-minded individuals. Each partner plays a critical role, and we have been delighted with how our Publisher partners have embraced theirs. They understand that each page of a newspaper published in the community they serve represents a page of that community’s history. Pages published 25, 50, or 100 years ago are considered “history” today, but pages printed today represent “history” 25, 50, and 100 years from now.
We regard our relationships with the publisher as partnerships, and we enjoy a collaborative approach in developing a strategy for preservation, access, and if they so choose monetization. We invite them to help us support the institutions within their community in their education and outreach efforts.
We use the only proven long-term preservation method for newspaper & document preservation, microfilming onto silver halide 35MM archival quality film. This polyester-based microfilm is the only medium currently recommended for preservation microfilming. This stable and durable medium has a life expectancy of over 500 years under the proper storage and handling conditions.
In addition to the long-term preservation of your content, subscriptions to your newspaper’s microfilm can be offered to interested institutions.
We offer profit sharing, and royalty arrangements, and qualifying publishers are rightfully compensated for any distribution of their content. Some publishers forgo these royalties, instead opting to donate these funds to the local libraries in the form of discounts on their microfilm subscription or credit for future preservation or access projects.
Access to this content is equally valuable, which is why we offer comprehensive (and affordable) digital solutions. Still, we view digitization as an enhancement to the preservation strategy and not a replacement for it and only if it respects the publisher’s policy and strategic plan for the use of their content…past, present, and future.
Some publishers find themselves trying to decide between the need to monetize this history and ways to add additional value to the community through open access to the pages of their archives. Advantage does not believe that these have to be mutually exclusive concepts. We designed our services to either stand-alone or compliment, enhance, and supplement services by other providers.
We have a dedicated team of account managers that work with Libraries, Colleges, and Historical Societies across the country, and we are very conscious of the fact that many institutions and government agencies continue to face funding challenges and restricted budgets. Due to the cuts, publishers are looking for alternative revenue streams and secondary markets for their back-file.
Unfortunately, many institutions can’t afford to pay for access from big aggregators of content. Our goal is to ensure that a model exists to make the limited funds of our community’s institutions as impactful as possible. At Advantage Archives, we believe there is a solution for any budget. We don’t subscribe to the idea of access to local history, only being available to the largest institutions. Local history should also be accessible to small and underserved communities.
Your community’s history can coexist behind a paywall, aggregation service, or business-to-consumer subscription website. Your content can become part of a larger pool of resources for genealogists and researchers, while simultaneously being available free to your community through an open, or restricted (within the walls of the school or library only) access model.
Regardless of the partnership arrangement, you can be confident that your copyright is respected at all times, and Advantage will never misuse your intellectual property.