Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives
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