HistoryIT, Inc. and The Crowley Company Announce Partnership to Provide Combined Services
Firms will deliver fully digital historical collections accessible by wide and diverse audiences
Portland, Me. and Frederick, Md. – HistoryIT announced today that it has teamed up with Maryland-based The Crowley Company so that their combined expertise can deliver state-of-the-art and fully accessible digital historical collections. The Crowley Company has served the scanning, digitization and micrographic needs of archivists, historians, librarians, county clerks, records managers and other collectors of historical materials since 1980. They bring their proven methodology and high-quality imaging services to the business partnership, which bolsters HistoryIT’s expert strategists, historians, technologists, metadata specialists and content developers. HistoryIT builds and implements strategies that make newly-digitized materials accessible to audiences and brings new value to the organizations that maintain them.
“The real challenge for so many of the entities that maintain historical collections is understanding how to remain relevant in the digital age,” says HistoryIT Founder and CEO Kristen Gwinn-Becker, PhD. “Knowing which materials to digitize, how to fund projects, how to sustain them and – perhaps most importantly – how to draw in wider audiences to the stories their archives contain, is absolutely critical to the survival of many cultural heritage organizations.” HistoryIT guides that process by providing strategic planning, metadata implementation, and content development services that allow their customers to build and maintain digital collections that are utilized by both researchers and the general public.
“Because HistoryIT is a technology and services company, we have the software framework in our ArchivesTree™ platform that allows managers to control the collections according to their own standards while simultaneously expanding how searchable those materials are by end-users of all levels. ” HistoryIT’s partnership with The Crowley Company, emphasizes Gwinn-Becker, “will allow us to deliver an end-to-end solution – from strategy to scanning to software to searchability and sharing – for organizations of any size. This approach is not only in the best interests of our customers; it is in the best interest of the important histories that they protect.”
“Our partnership with HistoryIT allows us to offer the full spectrum of collection preservation options to clients” says The Crowley Company co-owner and vice president, Pat Crowley. “With more than 30 years of experience in the capture of all media forms – document, book, large-format, microfilm, microfiche, aperture card, photograph and more – Crowley Imaging has digitized millions of high quality images from private and public collections and corporate and government records. In some cases, clients have had the resources to share these collections with the world. In other cases, due to budget constraints, lack of manpower or an inadequate infrastructure, the digitized images have been solely a source of preservation.” The beauty in this partnership, he says, is that “following front-end capture, clients of all sizes and incomes have access to HistoryIT’s ArchivesTree™ software and advanced collection strategy and metadata services, allowing them to move beyond digitization for preservation. Used in tandem, our joint products and services offer a practicality to the digitization of every collection.”
###
About The Crowley Company
Headquartered in Frederick, Maryland with offices in California and the United Kingdom, The Crowley Company (Crowley) is a world-leader in digital and analog film technologies. Crowley provides an extensive number of digital document and film conversion services to the academic, publishing, commercial, government and archive sectors. The firm manufactures, distributes and services high-speed microfilm, microfiche, aperture card, book and document scanners, microfilm duplicators, film processors and micrographics equipment. Manufactured brands include Mekel Technology, Wicks and Wilson, HF Processors and Extek Microsystems.
About HistoryIT
HistoryIT, Inc. is a transformative technology and services company that provides clients with a new approach to making online collections more useful, meaningful, and accessible. A national company headquartered in Portland, Maine, HistoryIT is owned and managed by professional historians, archivists, and technologists. They bring industry-leading expertise to preserve, make accessible and even monetize collections of all sizes. Working with cultural institutions, universities, community organizations, professional associations, businesses and others, HistoryIT bridges traditional history and cutting-edge technology to create appealing, accessible, effective digital spaces for archival resources.
Photos available upon request