By Lisa Larson
Prepress Editor

History can perhaps best be told through the annals of daily newspapers.

However, access to newspaper pages dating back decades, and sometimes even more than a century, has been limited to the time-consuming and somewhat tedious process of searching through rolls of microfilm.

Cold North Wind Inc., a privately held company based in Ottawa, is using best-of-breed technology to turn newspaper archives on microfilm into high-resolution, searchable, digital images on the Internet. Cold North Wind was founded in the fall of 1999 and was officially launched at last year’s Nexpo in San Francisco.

Cold North Wind is digitizing The Toronto Star’s microfilm archives, consisting of some 2 million individual broadsheet pages dating back to 1892. The Star will first make the online archive available to the academic and government markets, followed by the consumer and corporate markets. Photo courtesy of Cold North Wind

“Newspapers on microfilm provide us with a remarkable view of the past. Unfortunately, access to this material is limited by the locality of both microfilm readers and microfilm collections,” said Bob Huggins, chief executive officer of Cold North Wind. “Today, users want to get this information on the Internet, but digitizing these archives and then marketing them over the Web can be arduous and expensive for a newspaper to undertake on its own.”

The National Newspaper Association last month signed a letter of intent for Cold North Wind to digitize the microfilm archives of more than 3,600 U.S. newspapers, representing 65 percent of all circulation in the country, according to Huggins. The project will encompass some 500 million newspaper pages.

The company is also working on a project with Torstar Corp. to digitize the microfilm archives of The Toronto Star (daily, 460,654; Saturday, 704,891; Sunday, 469,811), consisting of some 2 million individual broadsheet pages dating back to the paper’s founding in 1892 through the end of 1999.

“It’s hard to describe the unique ability this product will have once it’s released. If you think of all the media that have a record of the past, there’s really nothing else that can compare against [newspapers] — and at least for us in the Toronto, Ontario, marketplace, what has gone on over the last 150 years. It kind of captures everything,” said Mark Rousseau, managing director of development for Torstar Electronic Media. “You take for granted all of the great information that you’ve produced because you’re a daily newspaper and you’re thinking of today’s paper and getting tomorrow’s paper out — and that’s it.”

Mark Rosseau

In addition to the $3.42-million services agreement with Cold North Wind to convert the microfilm morgue, Torstar bought a 19.9-percent stake in the company for $1.63 million. The investment agreement was finalized in January.

The digitization of the microfilm began in December, and by last month was about 95 percent complete. Torstar expects to have the process finished and to begin testing the database for scale this month.

“If we have, all of the sudden, 1,000 consecutive users, that’s what we’re going to have to test. We’ve done a bunch of internal testing, but it’s been a limited group of people. We’re fine-tuning the look of the user interface and the number of variables someone could pick, and testing the way the engine draws the records,” Rousseau explained. “But in June, July and a bit of August, we’ve got to start testing to scale up this thing. So we’ll be expanding our beta group to [several hundred] people and getting them all to [use the system] consecutively so we can test to make sure that the engine and the pipeline that we built for this works fine.”

The New York Post also signed an agreement earlier this year for Cold North Wind to digitize its microfilm archive and make it available on the Internet. Terms of that agreement were not disclosed.

New revenue from old news

Torstar has identified two primary markets for the online archive.

The first — and largest — market is made up of researchers, schools, universities and the government. There is also a smaller, but premium, market in the corporate blue-chip, public relations arena, where customers usually want the ASCII text of the story the day it’s published. This market now will have the option to see the actual page that the story ran on.

“It’s a revenue-producing use of our content. The primary market that we’re going after now is the educational, … libraries, (and) government marketplace — anyone interested in the past,” said Rousseau. “Before, there was really no way to access this information, unless you wanted to spend hours in the microfilm annals of a library. That’s the first market we’re going after. And then, later this year, we’ll also go after the consumer marketplace.”

For the academic and government market, as well as the corporate market, Torstar will charge an annual subscription or a subscription based on the number of consecutive users. The pricing for the consumer market will be one charge for a day pass or a three-day pass. Subscribers to The Toronto Star will get some kind of limited access as part of their subscription.

“For this year, those are the two markets we’ll focus on, and next year, when the technology within our company catches up, we’ll then explore the corporate, blue-chip, PR firm marketplace, where the full-page images will be an add-on to their current news product they’re getting,” Rousseau said.

The online archive will allow readers to search birth and death records as a separate variable, as well as to search the full text of headlines and articles.

“The Toronto Star has the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in Canada,” Huggins said. “Its digitized archives represent a rich social record that will be a treasure trove of historical material for researchers in Canada and around the world.”

Paper of Record project

Cold North Wind also has embarked on an ambitious project to digitize the archives of thousands of newspapers from around the world, some dating back several hundred years. The oldest newspaper in the project to date is a paper from Spain dating back to 1692.

The company is buying the rights to newspapers, some of which are defunct, and aggregating the data into one big newspaper archive. The Paper of Record collection represents a broad spectrum of the historical record from early European settlement onward, and includes most geographic areas of North America.

“We believe that the newspaper is the only continuous record of daily life for the past 400 years,” Huggins said. “We are creating a central repository. We are creating probably the largest physical site on the Net — somewhere between 100 and 300 terabytes of data.”

Cold North Wind plans to partner with other Internet portals that want to put the Paper of Record on their site, under a revenue-sharing model. The beta version of the Paper of Record project launched in April. The final version is expected to be ready by September.

Hays Goodman, reviews editor, contributed to this article.