My Biz: Advantage Archives saving history, with eye to free access

CEDAR RAPIDS — If you’re reading this on a digital device, chances are you’re only a few clicks away from your history, thanks in part to a Cedar Rapids business.

“It’s free and open access, owned by the community,” said Jeffrey Kiley. “We just make sure each community has their own community’s history archived, and it’s dedicated to their community, with their identity and their ownership.”

Kiley, 51, is CEO and co-founder of Advantage Archives.

  Buy Photo

The 35 employees at the company’s southwest Cedar Rapids offices scan and digitize source material — newspapers, photos, maps, yearbooks and other ephemera — and the company’s unusual business model helps get all that information to people interested in their family and community’s history.

Kiley and Chris Donohue, Advantage’s chief financial officer and co-founder, launched the company in 2010 after working at a similar business. Like most in the field, their former employer charged customers an annual fee for access to the records they’d digitized.

“It was lucrative, but it didn’t feel necessarily right,” Kiley said. “We felt there was a lack of communities owning their own history. They were having to rent it back after it was digitized.”

Business model

Instead, Advantage’s client organizations — public libraries, government agencies, local historical societies, churches, genealogical societies, schools and colleges — get a robust online database as part of the deal. Advantage charges its clients only for scanning and digitizing.

“Our competitors have either a monthly subscription fee or annual site licenses,” said Donohue, 52. “We get away from that, just because those fees become really expensive and hard (for clients) to budget each year.”

Once they’ve started, client organizations build their digital collections with additional materials, financing ongoing server access and maintenance for all customers. It’s especially attractive to local historical societies, often run by volunteers on shoestring budgets.

“It’s really a cooperative method,” said Kiley. “Now we’re seeing all of our newspaper customers coming back with yearbooks, city directories, atlases.

“We’re not asking them to pay a subscription or anything, but if they have some extra budget or they want to do something, that money funds the other 999 archives every time a page is added.”

By latest count the company maintains databases for 1,052 organizations nationwide. Local clients include the Cedar Rapids and Marion public libraries, Coe College and The History Center.

  Buy Photo

Saving newspapers

Most newspapers arrive on microfilm. Advantage uses old microfilm cameras to scan them to digital.

“It’s hard to find the actual microfilm,” Donohue said. “There’s one vendor in the country when parts go bad. Anytime there’s a camera out there we’ll buy one and just have the parts here just in case.”

Some human intervention is required to ensure the process goes smoothly.

“These newspapers were printed 150 years ago with the intention of being read once and getting thrown in the garbage,” Kiley said. “That paper starts to get faded and cracked and brittle, and the condition of the originals is going to determine the accuracy of the output.”

AI will help

Character-recognition software has improved, and the development of artificial intelligence opens new opportunities.

“Machine learning and AI has come so far that we are going to be moving heavily in that direction,” Donohue said. “We’re working on a whole lot of fun stuff.”

“The biggest benefit is going to be in the individual experience,” Kiley said. “Say I’m looking for my grandmother Lois Hill. AI might go out there and say ‘I’ve got a bunch of Lois Hills out there, they were born in the 1930s, so maybe we should try her husband’s name, so it’s Mrs. Leroy Hill, Mrs. L. Hill.’

“Let’s run all sorts of other scenarios and some misspellings out there. Let’s look at other information that may support it. You can do some really interesting data mining at the personal level through the search bar.”

Which leads to new opportunities.

“I really want educators to take advantage of this resource to teach national and international historic events using local primary sources,” Kiley said. “Put it in perspective with how your community saw it. It has far-reaching applications, not just teaching history.”

Know a business that should be considered for a “My Biz” feature? Let us know by emailing mary.sharp@thegazette.com.

  Buy Photo