Internet pioneer addresses recent Ad & Sales Club meeting

Posted Jan 19, 2012 By Jill Hudson

EMC News - Internet pioneer Bob Huggins spoke at the Ad & Sales Club at the Brockville Country Club on Jan. 11.

His number one legacy is Paper of Record.com - digitalized historical newspapers.

"The genesis of this was the value of what a newspaper was - for the past 500 years the newspaper represented the history of community knowledge wherever they are published around the world," said Huggins, in an interview with the EMC. He explained that at the time they developed this idea technology had to catch up with the idea.

"The question at the time - around 2001 is whether we can do it. The fact of the matter was there was not the bandwidth, there was not the storage capacity on computers and no way to get this to people, but we believed that there was going to be advances in the technology," Huggins said. "The planets aligned around 2003 and away we went."

Huggins has his BA in History from the University of Waterloo. He started his career at the Globe and Mail on the information side - he worked there from 1983-93.

Right away he saw the value of putting documents in digital form so that their lifeline would last and could be found in one location.

"I just saw it, microfilm being what it was, was deposited regionally all over the place. I saw the amount of traffic of people coming into the National Archives in Ottawa - looking for genealogy information - that was a big push."

He said people needed to know more about who they were and where they came from, including birth and death notices. "I've had people call me in tears describing how they found a long-lost relative or a mention of a relative or the first sighting of them coming off a passenger list into Quebec City from abroad. So, it's kind of remarkable."

He saw digitalizing the material as a way to preserve its content.

"A lot of this information will disappear because paper's unstable and microfilm is only stable within 50-70 years. So getting it onto a digital medium was very important," said Huggins.

Last week Huggins was voted in the top 100 Influential Canadians in baseball because of its database of historical information - including day-by-day score results from baseball games.

"The particular database spawned hundreds of books on the subject of baseball - because historians can go back and look at literally day-by-day boxscore by boxscore. What went on with baseball. I was surprised - out of the blue. It was all based on the historical data base that we created."

He said his talk at the Ad & Sales Club would include innovation, the internet and his experience with Google, how local businesses can look at the web as a marketing tool and how one positions their company. Huggins was there as part of a team which represents the Regional Innovation Centre (RIC) of Eastern Ontario, which is based in Ottawa.

He has been involved in more than 20 start-ups in Ottawa region with the innovation centre.

Huggins has worked with Internet clients throughout North America, London England and Stockholm Sweden where he has advised the Nobel Web group. He also mentors tech companies and has a personal portfolio of 30 companies that he works with.

His latest venture is documentary film making. This is his first project - a friend of his is fourth generation African/Canadian based in Windsor. The documentary is about Emancipation Day.

Google acquired the collection of digitalized historical newspapers in 2006 in secret and it was announced publicly in 2008. "We were in a very long protracted negotiation with them over almost a two-year period and it was not an easy negotiation but it was interesting," Huggins said, adding that they negotiated and got to meet Susan Wojcicki - the director of products at Google. "I tell people we pursued Google like a Grade 9 boy pursues a Grade 13 girl for a prom dance - and we were successful."

He believes in the vision behind digitalized news. "In theory it is a doable project - take every newspaper from everywhere, every page, every day for the last 500 years - all around the world. That's the kind of resources it would take to make it happen."

He committed saving pages intact from the very beginning. "We took a very important tact which was, "we're going to do full pages" and let the technology catch up with itself - and it's a good thing that we did. It helped us immeasurably around issues of legality and copyright and helped us produce a product that is able to be zoomed in...and microfilm isn't always in the best condition. So it's a very interesting process."

His daughter thinks of him as an inventor. Huggins said when children are asked what their parents do she says, "My Daddy is an inventor." He is proud of his legacy.

"It's a wonderful legacy - I am very proud of it," said Huggins. "In terms of being able to do something like this and leave a legacy which is an important legacy - as an educational resource. I think it's one of the highlights of my life."

Huggins' father came over as a Barnardo orphan in 1929 - sold to Canada for £10 (head tax on orphans) and worked as a farm labourer in southwestern Ontario.

"That influenced us, believe me," Huggins said. "He went back and served in WWII, met my mother in Aberdeen Scotland - she was a war bride - they came back to Canada and forged a life in Canada. I'm ultimately the creative visual person. I think that is where my side leans and that's what I like to do. I tend to do things that I like to do."

In October Ryerson ran an article on its website which refers to what has happened in Canada since Paper of Record was sold to Google. When the EMC asked Huggins about this he said,

"Very little - most of the Canadian history is not available. There is no priority with government archives - there have been symposiums about how to do it...they need to get on with their lives and make this meaningful and accessible to Canadians." The article refers to a quantity of microfilm and newspapers which are stored in a basement - inaccessible for most viewers.