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Information is your most valuable resource.

Our mission is to gather and organize uncommon and unexplored information.

Community Newspapers:

Chronicling people, places, and events over time.

Working with hundreds of small-town local community newspapers, we’ve digitized millions of pages which contain billions of data points from the exclusive information stored in unique archives. The local newspaper has chronicled the seemingly random and ordinary information that we organize into an accessible format with value never before realized.

Museums & Historical Societies:

Troves of undiscovered knowledge revealed.

Thousands of town museums and historical societies for decades and centuries have been collecting and organizing the narrow slice of information related to a defined geography and citizenry. Data that at first appears low value is being discovered for its depth and detail. Artifacts once viewed as strictly local are now considered high value by a broad audience.

Undiscovered information: most valuable of all.

Discovery requires expert planning, physical action, and application of divergent technologies.

Creative Engineering Solutions

Your information is ready for discovery! We offer engineering solutions tailored to provide excellent cost-to-value to organizations like historical societies and small museums.

OCR & Image Mapping
Content Processing for XML
Merge Disparate Databases
Export Proprietary Databases
Database Reconstruction
Hardware/Processor Design & Build

System and Application Solutions

In house senior engineering with mature production staff. Through our activities, we have developed the ideal combination of “saving printed archives” and “providing access” with our proprietary API-driven backend system.

UI Development for Web & Smartphone
H.I.D.E. Headless Content Management System
LLM development & Chatbot

From ink-on-paper to living information.

Words and images once locked in place now parade as organized data streams.

Digitization Services

We have scanned millions of pages of printed newspapers – unique historical content – available freely to anyone. SmallTownPapers is the leader in digitizing small-town and local newspaper archives from bound volumes. Our award winning, all-inclusive production and logistics process has a proven track record serving hundreds of publishers and historical stakeholders since 2004.

Service Details See Our Award

Hosting Platforms

SmallTownPapers offers outstanding free and low-cost hosting options on our servers or yours. Choose from premade standalone newspaper and periodical platform, museum-specific archive publishing platform, or custom-built solutions.

Newspaper Hosting Historical Hosting Custom App/API

Avoid Loss of Historical Information

It’s easy to think printed materials will be around forever, but they must be digitized and stored to avoid loss.

AIB™ PAL MiniServer

The power of AI on your own data, without the risk of third-party access.

The AIB Private Archive LLM (PAL) brings together the latest in open source LLM/Chatbot technologies and our award-winning ArchiveInABox archive publishing platform. It's a plug-and-play network device, designed for use within your internal network.

Preloaded with our proprietary indexed database enterprise, Tesseract OCR engine, browser-based user interface, Facebook Llama LLM, premium chatbot, and minimum of 2TB of storage.

Email inquiries.

SmallTownPapers®

Content Licensing

Much of our content, including billions of data points, is licensable for aggregation, LLM learning, and sub-licensable consumer and commercial products.

We offer new ways to better organize and access undiscovered information.

Contact Us

SmallTownPapers, Inc.
927 W Railroad Ave
Shelton, WA 98584 USA
(360) 427-6300

Client Announcements & News

MyHeritage.com

Content License for LLM

Sturgis Library (Massachusetts)

Rescue Loss of Large Newspaper Archive

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Creative & Engineering
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SmallTownPapers, Inc. has announced that genealogy research platform and family DNA testing provider MyHeritage has acquired a license to use content from the company’s extensive digitized archive collection to enhance research conducted through the MyHeritage online genealogy platform.

MyHeritage is extracting ‘digital DNA’ from the pages of select small-town newspaper archives for assimilation across its voluminous proprietary databases. The license agreement provides Israel-based MyHeritage access to a unique cross section of this exclusive newspaper archive, which includes family and other information useful to researchers and genealogists worldwide.

The data extracted from these newspaper records, potentially numbering in the hundreds of millions, can greatly enrich the connections that MyHeritage is able to provide its customers while researching their own family history.

“After learning from MyHeritage founder and CEO Gilad Japhet how the company’s proprietary technology assimilates newspaper archives in this highly advanced manner, I felt that the uniqueness of our archives would provide tremendous new value to their incredible database,” explained Paul Jeffko, founder and president of SmallTownPapers. “American small towns generate extraordinary information but it can be time consuming to access and easy to overlook relevant connections. Using small-town archives in this way demonstrates that MyHeritage is on a brilliant track,” Jeffko added.

MyHeritage uses artificial intelligence applied through its sophisticated extraction and matching technologies to identify names, relationships, locations and other data across a wide span of time from the newspaper archives. The result is more meaningful family and historical connections for their customers.

SmallTownPapers’ chief scientist Mike Meadway sees newspaper archives as an untapped trove of data. “Our content can be analyzed through the use of AI to extract previously undiscovered information which is personal and local yet correlates to and across geographical boundaries, giving researchers deeper and more rounded pictures of people and providing new avenues of research to pursue. There are many practical applications,” Meadway said.

Started two decades ago, SmallTownPapers has been working to digitize millions of pages of archives that have been at particular risk of permanent loss. Many are from small media markets and include specialty newspapers where the pages were never microfilmed and many have an archive consisting only of a single copy. SmallTownPapers has obtained, scanned and now owns many of these archives and today is working with publishers and historical stakeholders across the US to ensure even more of these newspaper archives are digitally preserved.

For more information about SmallTownPapers and opportunities to license its archive content, contact Communications Director Karen Tarica at karen@smalltownpapers.com.