We think this new website is so easy to use, and our county school teachers and students will also find it useful when doing local history projects.

The Registrar’s Office feels confident with our choice in keeping with technology – going digital – and with our selection of Advantage to process our conversions.”

Advantage has been a valuable partner for the scanning needs of the Linn County Treasurer’s office for many years. Their weekly pickup and delivery of our paperwork is always on time and very dependable. The ease of searching their indexing allows my employees to have immediate access to hundreds of thousands of documents at their fingertips! They are a great company to work with!”

I know there is always more work to do, and more mountains to climb, but I wanted to take a few minutes to show my gratitude, both as a librarian, and as a family historian. You guys all great! And thank you, also, for the shout out to libraries and all the other funding resources we work with to be able to digitize our newspapers and provide this wonderful resource for our communities. Next time I have an opportunity to visit with all the local organizations that helped make our project possible, I will share this article and show them how many archives have been preserved thanks to working with Advantage. We’re so pleased to be part of a true success story!

Searching for information on the archive website is similar to searching for information on Google.  Enter a name or keyword in the search field, and all the instances that name or keyword appears in all of these resources will be listed as search results.  You can narrow down the results by date and resource and also print, email or save the articles you find.

This project has been on my personal bucket list for years. The bound copies dating back to the 1880s are so fragile, they were literally falling apart and we couldn’t allow anyone to use them. Now with the newspapers searchable online, our history is preserved in a digital format that won’t crumble or be lost.

Newspapers preserve the history of our communities. We have had very consistent usage of the Jefferson newspaper archive… and statistics also show usage from all other states and many other countries.  We have always wanted to expand this resource to include resources that represent the history of the whole county.

Our Community History Archive has opened a window to things. You can uncover so much more, and so much more efficiently. Historic research is hard, going through newspaper after newspaper on a microfilm machine — your eyes miss things. This archive is going to help immensely.

Advantage’s approach is scalable as a comprehensive project not only for Iowa, but for any community across the country. We’re appreciative of Advantage’s approach and understanding for the value of the archive and their willingness to work as true partners.

We are so excited to make our history available to residents both young and old, and to tell our story to the rest of the state, country, and world. What started out as a small project has gotten bigger with additional communities in our area all eager to participate. With the help of two large grants, the cost to our communities will be minimal and the benefits will be great.

In the past, we would have been totally reliant on an outside vendor to provide access to this important historical archive. This allows us to make these items available through our website to anyone who needs them at no additional future cost.

We receive many requests that come to the library from people who are searching for information, and without exact newspaper dates, it can be difficult to find what they are looking for. By digitizing the collection — It will have a keyword search, so people should have a much easier time finding all kinds of old stories, obituaries, ads, and whatever else they might be searching for that ran on the pages of the newspaper through the years.

The digital archives of the Ida Grove Library is a fantastic resource for library staff, patrons, and visitors. Having a searchable online database of newspapers allows us to quickly find information that would have normally taken hours of searching microfilm rolls, we can now do this in a matter of minutes.

A newspaper is a journal of the life of a people, in the case of the Messenger, the life of the people of the Diocese of Davenport. So it is important that the Messenger be preserved. This new digital archive will make it easily accessible and preserve it for generations to come.

Our archives are an important part of community history. They help us understand events in our community’s history, and help us understand the contributions of generations past from a truly unique vantage point: as they were happening. Making these archives accessible to the public is a great service to the community.