Heritage Microfilm, Inc. (est. 1997) is a preservation microfilm and microfilm digitization business located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

History

The company began in 1996 when the microfilm division of Cedar Rapids-based Crest Information Technologies was sold to Christopher Gill. The microfilm division was responsible at the time for preserving newspapers and for microfilming business documents. The business document filming portion of the business was soon dropped in favor of the newspaper microfilming division. Crest in 1999 sold the remaining portion of the company to Lason. In 1999, Heritage Microfilm began digitizing newspaper microfilm and launched NewspaperArchive. Soon after, it began creating smaller "branded" newspaper archive websites in collaboration with publishing partners. The firm works with

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

/AIIM standards for preservation microfilming. It has a humidity and temperature-controlled storage facility. It is a

Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

ImageGuard facility. One of its specializations is damaged microfilm recovery. It has an Extek 3441 microfilm duplicator, which duplicates at low speeds to prevent damage to

Redox Redox (reduction–oxidation, , ) is a type of chemical reaction in which the oxidation states of substrate change. Oxidation is the loss of electrons or an increase in the oxidation state, while reduction is the gain of electrons or a ...

or Vinegar-Syndrome microfilm. It uses Kodak silver halide microfilm for master film and primary duplications. It discontinued the use of vesicular film for duplications, due to the poor quality film available from distributors. It claims to use Kodak BrownToner, a polysulfide film treatment, on every reel of silver-halide microfilm that they produce.

NewspaperArchive

NewspaperArchive is a commercial online database of digitized newspapers, and claims to be the world's largest newspaper archive. The site was launched in 1999 by Heritage Microfilm. , NewspaperArchive said it provided full-text search for 909 million articles on 85 million pages over 240 years that represented 2,875 publication titles in more than 748 cities. As of 2015, the product includes newspapers from Azerbaijan, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Uzbekistan. Searches can be conducted by keyword, date, and location. Results are free, but access to the newspaper articles available to download in

PDF format Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating system ...

requires a subscription. The company says that it follows the Automated Content Access Protocol in which its clients have a say in what is available online. The digitized newspapers that are currently available and OCR'd represent a fraction of the 150 million pages of historical documents that Heritage Microfilm maintains in its microform archive. According to NewspaperArchive, it has 180,000 reels of microfilm. A reviewer in 2004 observed that at the time the archive had some errors with year dates, and in June 2014, The

Iowa Attorney General The Attorney General of Iowa is the chief legal officer of the State of Iowa, United States. The office was created February 9, 1853. The Office of the Attorney General is housed in the Lucas State Office Building in Des Moines; the attorney g ...

’s Office opened an investigation after complaints about deceptive and misleading practices that include charging subscribers for involuntary donations to a charity. NewspaperArchive claims as of 30 June 2018 that it has online newspapers dating from 1607 worldwide and its index includes 9,829 newspapers.

Criticism

In a 2005

Association of College and Research Libraries The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academi ...

paper, Bernard F. Reilly, Jr. expressed concern about the extent of Heritage Microfilm's involvement with stewardship of historical resources otherwise assumed to be held in the

public trust The concept of public trust relates back to the origins of democratic government and its seminal idea that within the public lies the true power and future of a society; therefore, whatever ''trust'' citizens place in its officials must be respect ...

. Reilly wrote, "until 2002, the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

and the

Center for Research Libraries The Center for Research Libraries (also known by its acronym, CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries, based on a buy-in concept for membership of the consortia. The consortium acquires an ...

regularly microfilmed the principal daily newspaper of Jamaica, ''The Gleaner''. In 2002 the Gleaner Publishing Company executed an agreement with Heritage Microfilm, Inc. giving to the for-profit firm exclusive rights to reformat and distribute ''The Gleaner'', in both microform and digital format. Because Heritage now holds exclusive digital rights the agreement effectively shifts control of back files to the commercial sector, where it is marketed primarily for genealogists and family history researchers."

References

{{reflist Online archives of the United States Companies based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Companies established in 1997 Information technology companies of the United States Photography companies of the United States Digital preservation Mass digitization 1997 establishments in Iowa Newspaper companies of the United States Information technology companies

History

NewspaperArchive

Criticism

See also

References