Searching for information in past issues of newspapers is like looking for a potato chip in a landfill.

Most newspapers keep copies of previous editions in large bound volumes arranged in chronological order. Libraries frequently have microfilm copies of past editions too. However, the only way to find a particular article is to look at every page of the old papers or know the date something was published.

Paul Jeffko of West Seattle is helping to revolutionize newspaper archives with a computerized way to search for specific data in decades-old newspaper articles, advertisements and even photographs.

Using "optical character recognition" technology, his West Seattle-based company scans every page of a newspaper's past editions. The software can search through news articles, advertisements and even photographs for people's names or other particular subjects.

Just as importantly, it's all available on the Internet and free to users. Newspapers pay to have their archives scanned into the system but it's free to use.

Neither the Seattle Times nor the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have that capability. The P-I's electronic files go back to 1986 and the Times' date only to 1990. The dailies have clipping files arranged by subject but no scanned versions of prior papers.

Jeffko's business, called Small Town Papers, began six years ago. Some of the scanning is done in Maryland but the company is run from a converted house on California Avenue.

Back issues of 65 different small newspapers have been scanned and are available on the Small Town Papers website. Among the archives are newspapers such as Southeast Alaska's Island News from Prince of Wales Island, Alaska; The Buffalo Ridge Gazette in Ruthton, Minn.; The Dispatch from Maunaloa-Molokai, Hawaii, and The Durham Skywriter in Durham, N.C.

Some past editions of the West Seattle Herald - years 1937, 1952 and 1969 - are available online through Small Town Papers too.

The oldest paper electronically copied by Small Town Papers is the Woodville (Miss.) Republican, which dates back to 1824.

"We've got 150 years of content that has never been accessible before," Jeffko said. "We're enabling people to discover their community's history."

As far as Jeffko knows, his company is the only one providing searchable electronic access to the archives of small newspapers.

The service is used by historians, genealogists and other researchers. Many inquiries are personal.

"People write to me and say, 'My dad was falsely accused (of a crime) in a small town in Texas," Jeffko said.

Not every user is interested in the past. Many use Small Town Papers to search the latest editions of papers, most of which are online by Friday of any given week.

Jeffko developed his affinity for small towns while growing up in West Seattle, although with a 2000 population of nearly 79,000, West Seattle would be considered a small city elsewhere.

He grew up on 21st Avenue Southwest in the Puget Ridge neighborhood and went to Sanislo Elementary School and Boren Jr. High. By the time he was old enough for high school, his family moved to Long Beach, Calif. That's where he got into the printing business.

"I walked past a print shop on my way to school," Jeffko said. It was a commercial printer that caught his attention each time he went by.

"The owner asked if I wanted a job," Jeffko said. "He said, 'I see you looking in the window every day.'"

Jeffko was 14 when he started sweeping out the print shop. That's the way a young person got into the printing business back then, he said. No one went to school to become a printer. You got a job in a print shop and learned the trade there, he said

He got interested in typesetting, but that was shortly before computers fundamentally changed the printing business. Desktop publishing, with its multitude of fonts and type sizes, made the typesetter's job nearly obsolete.

Jeffko changed with the new technology and, after six years in California, he moved back to Seattle at age 20 and got a job as production manager of Western Type & Printing, which did typesetting work for the Seattle Times.

Later in his career, Jeffko spent time helping small newspapers make the leap from typewriters to computers. In 1993, he spent two months working with the Quad City Herald, a small weekly newspaper in Brewster, Wash.

"I got immersed in the charm of putting a paper out," he said.

Jeffko also saw how difficult it was to find articles published years ago in the Quad City Herald, which was founded in 1901. Each edition of the newspaper was quarter-folded and added to a bundle representing every year of publication. All of the archived bundles were then stored in the attic.

"I thought to myself, there must be a better way to do this," Jeffko said.

By the late 1990s Jeffko was a print broker, who orchestrated printing jobs on behalf of clients by recruiting artists and arranging for printers. One of his clients wanted to start producing "e-books," that is, electronic copies of books available by computer. Jeffko said they had to disassemble the books to scan the pages.

He didn't like destroying books to create electronic copies. So he started using optical character recognition technology and was soon thinking about the archives of the Quad City Herald. The Brewster weekly was the first to have its archives completely digitized in Small Town Papers.

Jeffko's next goal is to sell the value of his growing data base to one of the Internet's search engines.

Tim St. Clair can be contacted at tstclair@robinsonnews.com or 932-0300.