02/28/01 - NY POST TO PUT ENTIRE ARCHIVES ONLINE I found the following news item to be quite interesting and thought I would pass it on. Could be a valuable and inexpensive tool. Wednesday, February 28, 2001 NY POST TO PUT ENTIRE ARCHIVES ONLINE Microfilm To Be Digitized By Canadian Company by Wayne Robins Alexander Hamilton's editorials =97 online from the New York Post? The archives of America's oldest continually-published daily are going online, and may be accessible in time for the November bicentennial of the Federalists' paper, founded in 1801. "Our archives are really a treasure trove," said Post Editor Ken Chandler. "Over the years we've kept them intact on microfilm, but obviously that's a very cumbersome way to reach them." The digitizing is being done by Cold North Wind, a two-year-old company based in Ottawa, Ontario, with a division in Framingham, Mass. Last year the parent company of The Toronto Star bought a minority share in Cold North Wind, which is also digitizing the entire archives of that newspaper. "Newspapers are the only record of continuous daily life for the last 400 years," Cold North Wind's CEO Bob Huggins said in an interview with E&P Online last week. The company says it has acquired digital rights to thousands of newspapers dating back to the 1700's. Its proprietary software, known as Paper of Record, scans microfilm to create digital images of the original newspaper pages. The archives will be searchable, and can be automatically updated with a streaming feed. Cold North Wind and the newspapers with which it works will share revenue. Neither Huggins nor Chandler of the Post knows how the numbers or percentages will play out. But Huggins expects that subscriptions will "eliminate the nonsense of paying $2.95 or whatever per article." Chandler added, "We don't look at it as something that's going to generate great revenues. But we're sitting on an asset we haven't been able to exploit until now, so it's all kind of gravy."