On Sunday at the American Library Association conference in Washington, DC, information-preservation giant UMI is set to announce its Digital Vault Initiative, a massive effort to digitize its 5.5 billion page archive containing documents going back to the first texts printed in English. Over 8,000 K-12 schools subscribe to the service. Certain states, such as Texas and Arkansas, have chosen to subsidize the cost of the service for schools that provide Internet access to students. UMI is also negotiating alliances with the publishers of Time magazine and The New York Times to make comprehensive back-issue sets of those publications available via links into the ProQuest database on the publications' own Web sites. The cost of annual subscriptions for institutions range from several hundred dollars for access to a limited range of titles, to several million a year for access to the complete archive.
Texts are extensively indexed and searchable by keyword.
Many of the documents are available as full-page scans, including graphics. We're the only company that could do this. We've become the de facto nation's archive. The vault's earliest documents, going back to 1475, will be scanned into the database first. Microform has never been a format that anyone has been especially fond of.