“ArcaSearch assured us that they could reproduce the pencil markings better than the original books.  After seeing the images that they had produced for other types of records, we moved forward with the project to scan over 300 County Surveyor and other historic surveyor field books.  We had the choice of having the work done on-site or shipping the documents to their facility in Minnesota.   We chose to ship our documents to them, and they took the utmost care in handling and returning our original books.”

Read Testimonial Letter

When archivists at the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives at University of Massachusetts at North Dartmouth faced a daunting challenge in digitizing fragile editions of historic newspapers and aggregating them into a Portuguese-language, text-searchable research system, after an extensive search they turned to ArcaSearch:

 “After investigating the availability of digitization vendors in the United States familiarwith handling newspapers, a small library team developed an RFP. This became a learning process, which included deciding on our approach to digitizing the papers. One of the questionsfaced by the group was whether to digitize from existing microfilm, the preferred approachfollowed by the National Digital Newspaper Project, or directly from the original papers.Ultimately, because of issues of availability and quality of scanned images, we chose to digitize from the original."

“The vendor eventually chosen for the project was ArcaSearch, Minnesota.”

“Using a patented process, and working from the originals, [ArcaSearch] was able to maintain the quality of photographs and artwork in advertisements, something that is frequently lost when newspapers are digitized from black and white microfilm. The text is optimized, and the background lightened, therefore, each page is very readable.”

 … Read the white paper prepared for the World Library and Information Congress 2012 meeting in Helsinki: http://conference.ifla.org/past/ifla78/119-pacheco-en.pdf

Read how 100 years of the Wabash College student newspaper, The Bachelor, is available online in a searchable digital archive available to alumni, students, faculty and staff. The digital archive project at the Crawfordville, IN, campus was spearheaded by Archivist Beth Swift and was funded by a generous gift from alumnus  Jon and his wife Andrea Pactor.  As Beth notes: “In short, a whole new world of history opens to our Wabash family, and life in the Archives will never quite be the same!”

http://www.wabash.edu/news/displaystory.cfm?news_ID=8454

The hyperlink above is the overall story from the Wabash College news and information office and is the better link because it also contains the hyperlink to Beth’s blog, “Dear Old Wabash.”

http://blogs.wabash.edu/dear-old-wabash/2010/11/02/a-brave-new-world/