GenealogyBank.com

Profile: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at GenealogyBank

Digitizing, maintaining and expanding the vast archive that GenealogyBank features (over 793 million articles and records, and growing daily) is a remarkable and complicated process involving the efforts of many talented people. This growth involves increases in collections of historical newspapers, books and documents, as well as government records. GenealogyBank's archive is actually just one of many created by its parent company, NewsBank inc., a company headquartered in Naples, Fl., whose main operational center is a three-story building on the main street of the small Vermont town of Chester. Housed in that fairly nondescript building is a huge collection of archived data—over 350 terabytes of information, more than double the information contained in the Library of Congress! NewsBank, which also has facilities in Boston and Worcester, Mass., and El Paso, Texas, has 301 employees busily at work adding millions of articles and records of various kinds to its many databases each month.

Ken Picard, from the online publication Seven Days, recently wrote a fascinating article called "Information, Please" giving a behind-the-scenes look at what NewsBank does, and how it does it. To read Ken's article, click here.