BELL HOWELL CAPTURES HISTORY AGAIN BELL HOWELL CAPTURES HISTORY AGAIN Move over Zapruder, Bell Howell's Digital Vault Initiative is Making More Than 500 years of History Available on Internet ANN ARBOR, Mich., July 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Bell Howell Company (NYSE: BHW) currently in the news as the maker of the camera Abraham Zapruder used to film the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is again capturing history the whole world can access. The company's Ann Arbor, Mich.-based business, UMI, recently announced its plan to digitize 500 years worth of printed works -- everything from an original version of Gutenberg's Bible to the first issue of The Wall Street Journal -- by scanning the contents of its vast microfilmed archives. That collection contains hundreds of thousands of literary works, newspapers, periodicals, research collections and scholarly dissertations stored in three temperature and climate-controlled vaults in Ann Arbor. Bell Howell is calling this massive conversion from microform to electronic format the Digital Vault Initiative. Once complete, the collection will be the world's largest searchable online archive. For the first time, college researchers, students and public library patrons will be able to log on to the company's ProQuest Direct(R) online service at their library and search the entire collection, viewing the publications as they originally appeared with illustrations, photographs, surrounding stories and advertisements. Scanning of the 5.5 billion page images began in May and will continue over the course of several years. This project is being conducted in addition to the 37 million images of contemporary information that UMI adds to its existing digital collection each year. "Our goal is to become more than just purveyors of information," said Joseph Reynolds, president and CEO of UMI. "The Digital Vault Initiative will allow us to take the content of our enormous vault of information and place it directly into the context of an individual's research, studies or hobbies." The Conversion The first phase of the Digital Vault Initiative will focus on the company's collection of early English literature, including nearly every English-language book published from the invention of printing in 1475 to 1700. This collection, begun in 1938 as UMI's first microfilm project, includes such works as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Culpeper's The English Physician and Shakespeare's First Folio edition of 1623. Subsequent phases will concentrate on the company's extensive collection of newspapers and periodicals, including full runs of such publications as Time magazine, The New York Times and other key titles, in cooperation with publisher partners. Once completed, Reynolds said, Bell Howell's online archive will provide greater, richer depth of content than any other online resource. "We're taking better advantage of the Internet-based world in which we live," Reynolds said. "Imagine researching historical events such as the JFK or Lincoln assassinations and finding news stories from a wide variety of resources -- all from a single search." For 60 years, UMI has served as a global leader in collecting, organizing, and distributing value-added information worldwide to researchers and students in libraries and schools in some 160 countries. As a result of agreements with more than 8,000 publishers worldwide, UMI provides access to information and articles from periodicals, newspapers, out-of-print books, dissertations and other scholarly collections. These resources are available from UMI over the Internet, through ProQuest Direct(R), on CD-ROM, and in microform, print, and other media. More information about UMI is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.umi.com. Bell Howell Company, headquartered in Skokie, Ill., is a leading worldwide provider of solutions for information access and distribution. Additional information about Bell Howell is available on the Internet at http://www.bellhowell.com. SOURCE Bell Howell Company -0- 07/21/98 /NOTE TO EDITORS: Sidebar to above story Bell Howell No Stranger to History The Digital Vault Initiative is one of many Bell Howell history makers: Two years ago, Bell Howell was the first company to leverage Internet technologies to broadcast its annual meeting to shareholders around the world. In the late 1960s, Surveyor I spacecraft used Bell Howell zoom lens systems to transmit the first close-up pictures of the lunar surface. And in the 1950s, Bell Howell cameras were used by famous explorers to document their expeditions such as the 1954 climbing of the K2 summit and Admiral Byrd's exploration of Antarctica in 1955. The company even has four Academy Awards to its credit for motion picture innovations./ /CONTACT: Dan Ciancio of The Reynolds Communications Group, 847-581-9363, ext. 107; or Tina Creguer of UMI Company, 800-521-0600, ext. 3805; or Dwight A. Mater, Vice President, Investor Relations and Business Development of Bell Howell, 847-470-7111/ /Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com or fax, 800-758-5804, ext. 114098/ /Web site: http://www.umi.com/ /Web site: http://www.bellhowell.com/ (BHW) CO: Bell Howell Company; UMI ST: Michigan IN: MLM SU: (21 Jul 1998 14:20 EDT) ÿ