Friday, October 1, 2010

"Information, Please" article about NewsBank operations

My distant cousin, Tom Kemp, passed along the article "Information, Please" written by Ken Picard, which appeared in the 29 September 2010 issue of the 7 Days online newspaper, published in Vermont.

The article highlights the operations of NewsBank in Chester, Vermont, which is the largest and oldest of their sites.  The behind-the-scenes look at how the company operates is interesting and useful to understand.

The article notes:
NewsBank Inc. is the nation’s largest digital archiving service for the newspaper industry. Its on-site computers store 350 terabytes of information — that’s more than double the amount of data housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
and:
Each day, it archives the printed and online content of more than 2000 newspapers, magazines, wire services, business journals and other publications from around the globe — adding 1.2 million new articles to its database each month.
The article describes how NewsBank has adapted over the years in order to stay in business, and highlights some of the technologies that are used to convert printed material to digital images that can be searched online.

As many readers know, Tom Kemp is the Director of GenealogyBank, which is one of the companies owned by NewsBank, Inc.

Disclosure:  I have a complimentary subscription to http://www.genealogybank.com/, but have not been otherwise remunerated by NewsBank or anybody else to write this post.

1 comment:

FranE said...

I love genealogybank.com. I wouldn't be with out it. Thanks for the information.