A Behind-the-Scenes Look at NewsInHistory’s Newspaper Archive
Digitizing, maintaining and expanding the vast newspaper archive that NewsInHistory features (over 300 million articles, and growing daily) is a remarkable and complicated process involving the efforts of many talented people. NIH’s archive is actually just one of many created by its parent company, NewsBank inc., a company headquartered in Naples, Fl., whose main operational center is a three-story building on the main street of the small Vermont town of Chester. Housed in that fairly nondescript building is a huge collection of archived data—over 350 terabytes of information, more than double the information contained in the Library of Congress! NewsBank, which also has facilities in Boston and Worchester, Mass., and El Paso, Texas, has 301 employees busily at work adding 1.2 million articles of various kinds to its many databases each month.
Ken Picard, from the online publication “Seven Days,” recently wrote a fascinating article giving a behind-the-scenes look at what NewsBank does, and how it does it. To read more, click here.
I understand that when writing a blog, it’s necessary to show a picture and say a few words about yourself, so that people don’t think a nameless, faceless committee or advisory board is running the show. Here I am, a real person. My name is Tony Pettinato, and I live in Deerfield, Mass. I did my undergraduate studies in English at Oberlin College, my graduate work in Journalism at UC Berkeley, and have been a reporter for six newspapers. For the past fourteen years I have worked at NewsBank, six of those as a managing editor for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set project – NewsBank’s acclaimed effort that digitized and indexed twelve million pages of primary source documents – that gratified my lifelong interest in American history. And that led me to editing this history blog!
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