National Newspaper Association

Member of the Newspaper Association of America

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Inland Press Association

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Suburban Newspapers of America

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Washington Newspaper Publishers Association

SmallTownPapers was founded by Seattle entrepreneur Paul Jeffko in May 2000. As the owner of a successful printing and imaging business, Jeffko had been approached by an online publisher seeking to have printed books scanned and converted into digital files so they could be delivered digitally or via print-on-demand. As he digitized books and manuals creating fully-searchable and indexed PDF files, Jeffko saw a niche emerge. Having worked for a small town newspaper in Washington, Jeffko knew that often newspaper archives were confined to a single copy of the newspaper placed into a bound book and shelved in a back office. Due to the expense involved, few of these newspapers even preserve their archives on microfilm.

Technology now allows for not only the preservation of those historical archives but can also make them accessible to people around the world. SmallTownPapers was created to bring that technology to newspapers from the country's smallest towns.

SmallTownPapers has created a searchable image archive of printed newspapers from small towns across the United States. These newspapers hold unique information that does not appear in regional or national newspapers. This information is valuable to numerous segments of society including researchers, genealogists, historians, governments and legal professionals. The trouble has been access - reading the archives requires the time-consuming activity of physically searching through bound copies of archive editions.

Jeffko's company scans and processes images of newspaper pages directly from the printed page. The company then uses powerful new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to read the scanned file and ultimately create a high-quality, online searchable archive. The digitally archived newspapers appear exactly as the pages were printed, and all of the text, even advertisements, is searchable.

SmallTownPapers provides the digital imaging service to newspaper publishers at no cost. Currently, the archives of three dozen newspapers are available at www.smalltownpapers.com and the company is poised for immediate expansion.