Newspapers contain a wealth of information, but finding specific information within its pages presents a considerable challenge. Unless the newspaper has been microfilmed (and often even if it has been), institutions hold very few copies and these are often not available through inter-library loan. Even with direct access to a newspaper, unless that paper has been indexed, searching for and obtaining the desired information can be a formidable task.

At its best, a digitized newspaper makes its complete information fully searchable and accessible to anyone with Internet access. But newspapers present some distinct challenges in maintenance and distribution.

Why digitize? Document digitization can greatly increase access to the information they contain. Digitized documents can be made available to multiple users, and if desired, anyone with Internet access.

Contentra Technologies has grown rapidly into one of the leading service providers of newspaper content, books, journals, manuscripts and similar published information to national libraries and content aggregators. Our facilities have the resources and capacity to handle high-volume projects and demanding schedules. Our experienced professionals, backed by strong technical support, allows Contentra to transform large files of newspaper content from images, microfilm and/or born digital format to client- designated output and hosting platforms.

Our team has been meeting challenging quality standards, small turnaround windows, and even poor input quality for many large libraries, newspaper companies, and aggregators around the globe. We offer services and technology across digitization platforms and XML standards to help build and monetize historic and contemporary newspaper collections.

We work every day with the very latest library standards for imaging, metadata and XML. We are a leader in METS/ALTO processing for books, periodicals, and newspapers, processing hundreds of thousands of pages per month, including delivering to NDNP standards for newspaper digitization.

Contentra has digitized more than 100+ million pages of newspapers – from the 18th to the 21st century – for national and academic research libraries, local historical societies, newspaper publishers and commercial information aggregators. Newspaper digitization can mainly be classified into two categories: