UIUC Library has selected Olive Software to preserve local history by digitizing approximately 50,000 pages of the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, two decades of yearbook, the Illio, and a local newspaper, the Urbana Daily Courier.

Official Press Release from Olive Software:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Chooses Olive Software to Preserve Institution’s Legacy

SANTA CLARA, California, March 2, 2007 – The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign selected Olive Software to preserve the college’s history by digitizing approximately 50,000 pages of the student newspaper, the Daily Illini, two decades of yearbook, the Illio, and a local newspaper, the Urbana Daily Courier.

The Daily Illini provides a rich chronicle of student life and culture on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. Courses offered by the Departments of History, Speech Communications, Journalism, and Anthropology draw heavily on the paper as source material on all aspects of the social, institutional, and cultural history of the University. However, prior to Olive, the utility of the material was limited as it was only available on microfilm and lacked indexing. Once digitized, Olive’s ActivePaper Archive will enable keyword online access to the contents of the student newspaper and will dramatically increase its value to researchers at all levels, as well as to the University’s alumni.

Features such as a customizable interface to ensure brand extension, robust search capabilities for improved user experience, and the ability to have multiple publications such as newspapers and student yearbooks reside on the same repository remain the most sought after among Olive customers. The institution went through a thorough and rigorous vendor evaluation before selecting Olive to undertake this vital project.

Mary Stuart, History, Philosophy and Newspaper Librarian Professor of Library Administration for UIUC, explained the provider selection process: “We examined several products in planning our newspaper digitization projects, and we concluded that Olive offered the best functionality and usability features. An important advantage of Olive Software for us is that it comes closest to being a ‘plug and play’ system, even when hosted locally. Some of the alternative products require a dedicated programmer to maintain. Last but not least, several institutions we contacted that have worked with Olive on newspaper digitization projects reported a high level of satisfaction with the company.”

“Olive is proud to offer a solution that fits UIUC’s needs,” commented Yuval Rachmilevitz, Olive’s President and CEO. “More and more users rely on electronic formats for research and scholarly works. It is essential that institutions are able to manage their digital collections internally and preserve their legacy in permanent archives for the next generation of readers.”

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign joins numerous institutions that use Olive’s digitization services and its ActivePaper Archive to ensure the future-proof preservation of their content. Olive provides archiving solutions to some of the most prominent US and international institutions including Penn State University, The Scotsman, Ithaca College, Brooklyn Public Library, Oberlin College, and many others.

About University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
The University Library holds over ten million volumes, more than 90,000 serial titles, and more than nine million manuscripts, maps, slides, audio tapes, microforms, videotapes, laser discs, and other non-print material. Among the Library’s most notable collections are its holdings in Slavic and Eastern European history, literature, and science; music, especially Renaissance music; 17th- and 18th-century American and British literature; American, British and Irish history, including a distinguished collection of Lincolniana; French, German, and Italian literature, including world-famous Proust, Rilke, Dante, and Tasso collections; Latin American history and literature; historic and modern maps; entomology, ornithology, botany, chemistry and mathematics; and serials across all disciplines.

About Olive Software
Olive Software (www.olivesoftware.com) enables its customers to transform their content resources into intelligent knowledge assets, enabling information discovery, effective search and future-proof preservation. Hundreds of companies and millions of end-users rely on Olive to unlock the information in their content and publish it through a browser, customized web application or portal, or knowledge management application. Olive’s end-to-end electronic publishing platform understands the structure and semantics of electronic, paper, microfilm, and microfiche documents and automatically converts them to XML with highly searchable metadata.

Olive Software is based in Santa Clara, California, with sales offices in New York, Washington DC, Denver, and Los Angeles, and R&D facilities in Israel.
Media Contacts:
Olive Software, Inc.
Sasha Frey
Marketing Manager
Email: sashaf@olivesoftware.com
www.olivesoftware.com

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
Mary Stuart
History, Philosophy and Newspaper Librarian
Professor of Library Administration
Email: m-stuart@uiuc.edu
www.uiuc.edu