It’s truly amazing what you can find. I’ve searched some personal family history/genealogy items and information for work. It’s helpful that there are different ways to narrow a search, such as choosing specific newspapers or choosing a particular decade. The matches by decade can be interesting because you can see the time frame where your search item has the most “hits.” So many times we’ve tried to research something, and it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack unless you had a date to go by. This makes research so much easier and more productive. I have the site bookmarked on my computer!

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

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

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

Our Community History Archive is a valuable research tool for our Moline community because it saves the time of the researcher and makes “lost things found. One example, in working on a collaborative project with a local museum for the upcoming 100th Anniversary of Suffrage in the United States, I found sample ballots for a local election—the men’s ballot and the women’s ballot from 1919.  Illinois allowed women to vote in 1891 for school officials and by 1913, Governor Edward Dunne signed the Illinois suffrage bill

We are excited that this project will unlock a significant source of local history for casual and serious researchers and genealogists, and perhaps even students in local schools

Free to users, the Advantage Community History Archive is incredibly user-friendly with a wonderful search engine and clipping tool that saves the newspaper source and info. It has easier and better searching than even some of the huge paid online sites. I love how it can highlight articles you have already viewed, which is enormously helpful when returning to a search of hundreds of articles on the same computer later so you don’t lose your place

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

Sometimes, a person will come to us and say, ‘I know my aunt died in 1936 but I don’t know the right date.’ So you’re searching for the reel, looking for the right one… you can never be 100 percent sure you missed it. We could be more accurate and more timely and give people exactly what they want, rather than close to it

Many states participating in the National Digital Newspaper Project, or Chronicling America, have had additional newspapers beyond this project digitized. One vendor that caught our interest while researching our own such project is Advantage Archives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They contracted with the Divide County Public Library to digitize the area newspapers from microfilm created by the North Dakota State Archives. Being a Divide County native, it certainly captured my interest as I was able to search for relatives — and even myself!

Our Community History Archive is a valuable tool for preserving and celebrating the past and guiding the future. Having access to information about the heritage of our town is important for determining our place in that continuing narrative, helping create meaning and a dynamic sense of community identity

Our Community History Archive is a valuable asset for anyone,  because it is readily available to anyone with or without a library card. We are very pleased with the services offered by Advantage Archives. It has helped us to offer a valuable resource and service to our community

Our partnership with Advantage Archives  has benefited us in two very important ways: 1) our print copies are no longer subject to so much physical handling, and 2) our collections are now visible and usable online so that visitors no longer have to travel long distances to view the materials on site

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?

This is the first time that people can access these old newspapers without microfilm or online newspapers by subscription. This is a gift from our organizations to this community.

We live in a time where people have come to expect that the vast majority of information that they are seeking can be found quickly through online searches. However extremely specific questions like those we see with local history questions don’t lend themselves to successful “Google” searches. By providing access to this material online we’re contributing to our mission to provide material to our patrons in the manner and fashion that they now perform their research

I think one of the things we enjoy most about the digital archive is the people we come into contact with. We receive calls from all over the country looking for information, mostly genealogy questions. Helping them find their answers is always a lot of fun and we get to share in their discoveries. People are always so grateful that the information is available

Our Community History Archive has given the local community easier access to the history they want. By digitizing the local newspapers, people can search for specific things rather than just browsing the microfilm. This increases the success rate of finding what content they are looking for. They may even find content they didn’t even know existed. Even if specifics are unknown, browsing is made easier as well with the digital format.