Our Community History Archive aligns directly with the portion of our mission that states that the public library will “maintain and improve the quality of life for all citizens of our community by providing resources and programs that enhance and contribute to individual knowledge, enlightenment, and enjoyment in the most efficient manner possible.”  What could be a more efficient method to access information than a digitized collection?

We love having our digital archives available and free to anyone through Advantage Archives. We have received great feedback from our patrons and even from across the country of how grateful everyone is for this resource for genealogy and history research. Staff has also found it a great time saver when more in-depth research is needed, by allowing us to search more uncommon requests easily and quickly.

Having a primary resource is an invaluable way to get details and day-to-day information from the time period. Using a resource published after the fact is more of a review. Plus, newspapers have so much more information that you end up finding things you weren’t looking for.

Local history is important to our community, and having resources available online, has opened access to documents that are fragile, and in need of preservation.  Having a digitized archive has made finding relevant material much more efficient, and enabled us to integrate multiple resources within one search.  Our community history archive has allowed us to serve a global audience, rather than just those individuals who walk through our doors.  Digitized resources are invaluable, and we plan to continue to add resources to our Community History Archive each year.

You can go online and search for anything in those papers, and you can even crop sections, add notations, and save it as a digital image instead of taking out a newspaper from 1926. Archivists know it’s not the newspaper that’s valuable, but the content in that paper. We have a number of publications we can’t even bring out of the box because they’re just falling apart.