Digitizing yearbooks creates a portal to a community’s past and a practical way to connect to it.
Yearbooks offer a snapshot of your community at a particular time or moment. They open the door to a familiar past for individuals diving into genealogical research or just reminiscing about their past.
Due to the popularity and value the community places on them, scanning yearbooks and making them available online has become one of the most sought-after offerings by alums, libraries, schools, institutions, and organizations of all sizes
Yearbooks are more than just a record of ambitions, activities, clothes, and hairstyles. Yearbooks have become a valuable resource for genealogists, local historical and preservation societies, media outlets, and community cultural organizations. In addition, a community’s yearbooks offer a uniquely personal perspective on the past that other historical records often fail to capture.
Yearbooks can also help researchers understand local and national events from the perspective of the youth at the time and can be used to understand the public sentiment on social issues at various times throughout the community’s history.
Pick a time and day that work for you, and we will set up a telephone or video meeting to discuss how Advantage can help you and your community.
Making New England History Accessible to Anyone from Anywhere
We work on digitizing New England’s rich history, one community at a time. Thanks to strong partnerships with communities across the region, New England’s primary source materials are more discoverable and easily accessible. Free online digital access allows New Englanders to understand and connect to their past in a meaningful way.
Digitization Of Historical New England Documents
Printed, handwritten, and even drawn content contained in the documents in communities across the region of New England provides invaluable insight into the people, places, and events, that shaped New England.
Once digitized, these New England records, writings, and documents can be made easily accessible in a Community History Archive or provided to you to be used in your institution’s existing access solution.
Digitization Of New England’s Newspapers Microfilm
New Englanders that visit your institution will have a powerful tool that can save time by searching through your community’s history by name, date range, keywords, publication, or location…and not limited to a reel at a time or if a microfilm reader is occupied (or operational!).
Advantage Archives also offers a user-friendly digital solution to research New England history via our Community History Archives hosted solution.
New England’s Community History Archives
Connect New England’s communities to their past with a Community History Archive, an easy-to-use yet powerful digital search platform. Advantage Archives hosts these “portals to the past” at no cost to New England institutions, so you, in turn, can offer free access to your community.
These free-to-use digital archives provide practical access to New England’s local primary resources and are available to anyone, at any time, on any device, for free!
Digitization Of New England’s Photographic Originals
Digitization ensures that the photographs, negatives, or slides that captured New England’s history can be viewed anytime, anywhere, from any device. This allows us to see with our own eyes the people, places, and events from long ago that shaped New England.
Digitized photographic materials enable New Englanders to share those moments with others, while the original copy can be properly stored to preserve it and minimize handling.
Digitization Of New England’s Books And Bound Volumes
Books, journals, bound newspaper volumes, ledgers, scrapbooks, and other collated paper documents contain the accounts of the events, people, and places that shaped your community, the region of New England, and the nation.
Digitizing these pages from New England’s past minimizes the handling of the original materials and ensures that this important local history is never lost to fading, torn pages, broken bindings, or contaminants!
Digitization of Yearbooks and Annuals From New England
New England’s yearbooks and annuals capture a snapshot in time, providing insight into the people of New England and the times in which they lived. Alumni, genealogists, or anyone that wants to look back on their “glory days” will have free access to those pages of New England’s past.
Advantage Archives provides non-destructive scanning solutions and online digital access to these valuable records of the history of New England.
Digitization Of New England’s Maps, Land Records, And Atlases
Converting New England’s maps, state and county atlases, land records, plats, plans, prints, and large format documents to a portable and easily searchable digital format will save space, shorten research time, and make the content widely accessible.
Digitization limits the need to handle the original. These historical New England documents are often so large and on such thin paper that they are at risk each time they are unfolded.
Preservation Microfilming To Archive New England’s Past
We believe that the preservation of New England’s history is a shared responsibility. We are proud to partner with like-minded individuals across the state to preserve the words printed in New England’s newspapers & documents.
Silver halide 35MM archival microfilm is stable and durable, with a life expectancy of over 500 years under the proper storage and handling conditions. The only way to preserve New England’s past, giving it a future.
Imaging Services For New England Industries And Government
The document imaging services from the Information Management Solutions team rise above the level of a typical “service bureau.” We approach each scanning, indexing, or conversion project from the perspective of a partner with a mutually shared goal.
No other “scanning company” in New England or large national records management business can compete with our approach or our pride in the partnerships we develop.
Don’t Just Take Our Word For It!
See what some of our partners from around New England have to say about their relationship with Advantage Archives, their Community History Archive, or the importance of making New England’s history more accessible.
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.
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.
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?
When I knew that I wanted to digitize our microfilm collection I started doing research into companies that provided that service. Advantage Archive stood out to me for many reasons. Their offerings checked all the boxes of what we needed. The ability to keyword search our newspapers in the database was essential, there was no monthly or yearly fee to maintain the database, and they’re amazing at working with a library’s budget and letting you add to your collection as time and money allows. Also, they came recommended by many other libraries in my region. Grant has been wonderful to work with!
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.
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.
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.
The history of Dryden is so fascinating. There are so many little stories, so many people – the amazing people that came through here and settled this area and created the village, the industry, and the library itself. It’s just fascinating. And knowing those stories aren’t just buried in the newspaper or lost, or stuck on microfilm, and now are accessible, is just huge. When we know where we’ve been, where we came from, I think we can create a better future for Dryden. It’s such a wonderful village. The people are involved and care about it. So anything we can do to solidify the foundation is priceless.
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.
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.
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.
I want to tell you how excited we are with our digitization of our old newspapers. With trepidation we sent you all 42 reels of microfilm. They were returned safely and now we have this wonderful searchable database. We can search so many ways, and the best part is, with the link on our homepage, our newspapers, dating back to 1850, are available from anywhere in the world! Now when someone in Michigan wants genealogy help, they are but a click away. Thank you thank you thank you. Progress is great!
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The Old Town Public Library The library has unlocked Old Town’s history with access to over 130 years of local newspapers, yearbooks, city reports, a pictorial histories; vital records; church records; history of Temple Israel. as well as the histories of surrounding towns The Old Town Public Library is located in Old Town, Maine, serving […]
The Dover Public Library The Community History Archives of the Dover Public Library allows for access to the history of Dover, New Hampshire through Dover area City Directories from 1830—1949 and Dover High School Yearbooks from 1915—2013 The Dover Public Library is located in Dover, New Hampshire, and serves a community of 31,000. Dover is […]
The Albert Wisner Public Library offers the Warwick community a way to connect to its past with an archive containing nearly 135 years of the community’s two local weekly newspapers. The Albert Wisner Public Library is located in Warwick, New York, serving a community of 30,000 in the Warwick Valley Central School District area. Warwick […]
Bring New England's Past Into The Present
Provide Free Access to Local New England History With a
Community History Archive
Advantage Archives partners with communities in New England and across the United States to archive & provide practical digital access to local historical content so that anyone, anywhere, can access it at any time, for free.
If you are affiliated with a New England library, newspaper publisher, genealogical society, historical society, government agency, or educational institution, and are interested in seeing more of New England's primary sources and local history online, let's schedule a time to talk about creating a Community History Archive!
Join The Conversation!
A community is more than just a group of people that happen to live in the same place; it is a group of individuals that share a feeling of fellowship with others as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. That is why we created CommunityHistoryArchives.com. Community History Archives is a "community of communities," connecting like-minded individuals and institutions that share our love of history and a passion for connecting our communities to their past!
