Each year, the Sunnyvale Public Library receives more than 750,000 visitors who check out over 2 million items. With such a busy environment staff is always looking for ways to improve productivity.

The historical Sunnyvale newspaper archive, dating back to 1906, was mostly on microfilm (some on old print). It required a significant amount of staff time to help patrons research the archive. In addition, the print paper was starting to deteriorate. Because of this, a desire grew to digitally convert the archive with the purpose of making the records easily searchable and preserving them long into the future.

Christine Mendoza, Supervising Librarian, states “We had very little experience with digitizing newspapers. Initially, we thought doing the scanning ourselves might be an option but it soon became apparent that it would require too much staff involvement. We found BMI’s Digital ReeL to be a cost effective solution; BMI helped us resolve the issues that normally come up with a newspaper scanning project.