March 12, 1999, 1:00 P.M. EST, Bethesda, MD - Progressive Technology Federal Systems, Inc. (PTFS) announced today that it has been awarded a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract from the Chicago Tribune. As part of the "Digitization of News Archives Project," PTFS will supply and integrate a turn-key solution using its AVATAR Archival Retrieval software (AAR) and digitize a significant portion of the Chicago Tribune's archives collection, creating a fully searchable digital library covering material from 1849 to the present. Content to be digitized includes more than fifteen million newspaper clippings from the early 1900's to 1984, the full text and image of every front page from 1849 through the present, and the full text of all obituaries and death notices from 1849 through 1997. The project is reportedly the largest digitization effort to be undertaken by a newspaper.
John Yokley, President of PTFS, commented, "The preparation for this technologically demanding project required the significant and cooperative efforts of multiple PTFS business units. PTFS, the systems integration unit, has worked for more than a year to innovate numerous hardware and document processing techniques to allow for the highly specialized grayscale image capture and image enhancement which this project demands. In addition, the PTFS affiliate company, AVATAR, Inc,. has developed NewsScanTM, a highly customized version of its popular EnMasse!TM image capture and document conversion application. NewsScanTM has been developed specifically to digitize and catalog newspaper content including newspaper clippings, full pages, and data archived on microfilm.
PTFS Project Manager, Skip Slawson, observed "PTFS will make imaging history with the Digitization of News Archives Project. This is due not so much to the massive scope of the project but due more to the innovative technologies and physical processes that have been developed over the past year of R&D; in preparation for this project. Prior to this significant R&D; effort, this project could not have been approached in a technologically viable or cost effective manner."
The Chicago Tribune is a subsidiary of The Tribune Company, which is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Tribune (NYSE: TRB) is a leading media company with operations in television and radio broadcasting, publishing, education, and interactive ventures. In 1999, for the second straight year, Tribune ranked No. 1 among its industry peers in Fortune magazine's list of America's most-admired companies.
PTFS is a Bethesda, MD based systems integration company which is highly focused in the areas of digital libraries, document imaging, library automation, production document conversion, forms processing, software engineering, and information/knowledge management solutions.