Lateef Chandler: MetaSource offers large scale document scanning and digitization for many different companies, mostly across the Boston area.

Travis Williams: Anything in the world you might have lying around, paper or film or microfiche, we can help try to figure out how to preserve it and make sure it stays around.

Lateef Chandler: We have a very large magazine archival project with EBSCO, a number of publications that we would be scanning for them.

Courtney Peckham: We've used MetaSource in the past and they've been a great partner, but this the biggest single project we've undertaken with them. We're looking at Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Popular Science and Popular Photography. It's a lot of content. We needed a partner that knew how to handle this kind of content, historical content, and at scale.

John Dunham: Typically, we get shipments every day and we ship them three days a week to MetaSource. It’s usually about 1 or 2 boxes. For this particular project we received 12 pallets, which was significant. It was evident that they'd been sitting for a long time. Getting the pallets in a condition that they can safely travel and not be damaged is probably the most important thing, because a lot of this material is old, but then it's just scheduling pickup, coordinating with the receiver and making sure things get there safely and on time.

Courtney Peckham: For publishers, we look for partners who are interested in having their back file digitized. A lot of them have hard copies that have been stored away for decades or longer.

Colin Kearns: These archives allow our readers or scholars or whomever to travel back in time, to go back to 1895 and to read the very first stories in the very first issue of Field & Stream, as well as all the important kind of groundbreaking journalism that Field & Stream did. 30 years from now, or maybe not even that long, we would reach a point where there would be no one alive who knew how instrumental Field & Stream was in conservation initiatives, such as establishing the Duck Stamp Act, or that Theodore Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway were published in Field & Stream. I mean, all of that history would be erased. So yeah, I'm really, really fired up about this, if you can't tell.

Adam Morath: I think we can look back to these archives for inspiration, to read about breakthroughs that in their time seemed impossible, seemed at one point like science fiction, and comparing that to where we actually are. Outdoor Life for years has covered, for instance, close calls in the wild. And there's so much that we've learned about survival, woodcraft, that can be passed down. It's generational knowledge that helps people have safer, more successful adventures in the wild today.

Courtney Peckham: Magazine archives are excellent primary source material for research and they all have different perspectives. We can look at an event in time, like the the moon landing, and compare how, say, Life Magazine covered it as opposed to Time, as opposed to some of the more political magazines. 

Adam Morath: We felt comfortable handing over our physical archives for digitization, because we knew that that work that goes into maintaining digital archives, making sure that the files remain available in the proper formatting, that they don't become corrupted or lost, is something that we can rely on EBSCO as a partner for. 

Alex Blackmer: Typically when we receive documents in, we go through, we determine exactly what the requirements are based on the client's specifications. We get them checked in to our production control system. So everything is labeled, everything is tracked throughout every step of the process, From that point, it goes into our document preparation area. They are the first people to really have their hands on the documents.

Michael Burchianti: With the EBSCO project, we're dealing magazines that date back to the late 1800s. We have to make a decision can we touch it? Because there's a point where you could just destroy it by touching it.

Lateef Chandler: We receive quite a bit of imagery and documentation that has been very damaged, sometimes poorly kept. Quite often we're able to actually get a better image that they actually gave it to us in.

Alex Blackmer: Once the documents go through document preparation, it comes over to my area, which is the scanning department.

Lateef Chandler: The scanning capabilities have definitely increased over the years. The capability of the scanners is able to not only capture better images much clearer, faster, in many cases safer.

Alex Blackmer: From there, it goes to our quality control team to make sure that anything we might have missed in the preparation of scanning of the documents has a final step to make sure that everything is as complete as we can get it.

Michael Burchianti: When clients hire a vendor that comes in and says, “Everything's fully automated, it's going to flow from start to finish and you're going to get a great product,” there will be cleanup. But I think what MetaSource does well is leveraging the technology but then layering in the human intervention.

Travis Willaims: MetaSource is the people here. I think the biggest thing we have is that everyone here is very engaged. There's going to be someone who is working on it, who cares about it, who's paying attention. That's what I think is the heart of what we do is we’re folks who are caring about what we give back.