Under the authority of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, the State Historical Society has signed a 5-year contract to loan the newspapers to the Advantage Companies, a Cedar Rapids business with a division dedicated to the preservation and digital access of historical newspapers. Advantage will take on the ambitious new project at no cost to the state, and ownership of the physical newspapers will remain with the State Historical Society.
Kyle Munson also wrote about this in Sunday’s Register.
Newspapers have been set aside in the Historical Building waiting to be archived for nearly a decade, ever since the process was put on hold in 2009. I assume or at least hope that these recent papers are part of the deal.
Advantage has already archived papers from many communities across Iowa — the UNI Library has a page full of links — and I have been deep-diving into those wells occasionally. (The website formatting changed a bit last year, making it flaky on some browsers.)