X-CAGO and CONCENTRA announce belgian newspaper digitization

Digitized Archives, dating back 125 years of Het Belang van Limburg (HBVL)

HASSELT (Belgium) - ROERMOND (The Netherlands)
X-CAGO b.v. and Concentra, a leading Belgian newspaper group, will release on the Internet access to 125 years of the newspaper Het Belang van Limburg (HBVL). The digitized archive covers 125 years and contains over 500,000 newspaper pages.

Het Belang van Limburg, Belgian's largest daily newspaper focusing on the Limburg regio, is the first in Belgium to digitize and place online its complete archives. The archives will be made accessible worldwide via the Internet, and can be searched and viewed by keyword or date, unleashing a treasure of historical material. The archives will also be used by the newspaper to produce special thematic publications, repurposing their content.

Founded in 1879 by Nicolaas Theelen (1848-1918), Het Algemeen Belang Limburg was the initially name of the newspaper. The newspaper targeted the Flemish speaking part of Limburg, a province of Belgium. Mr. Theelen's son Frans (1885-1971), took the company to the next level and founded Concentra in 1926, being a publisher of regional newspapers. The newspaper Het Algemeen belang was renamed Het Belang van Limburg in 1933 and, became a daily paper. Since 2000 Concentra NV is listed at the Brussels stock exchange.

The digitized archives are hosted at HOSTIT, a mission critical hosting and solution centre located in Belgium. HOSTIT provides services to numerous publishers in Belgium and beyond for their Online Services.

"By digitizing our archives we unleash our valuable content for untapped revenue streams and services " says Filip Beckers, Info Brooker at Concentra Media NV.

"125 years of history digitizing from paper to publishing on the Internet is truly an amazing feat! The X-CAGO team together with the HOSTIT team is very proud to be breaking historical ground in Belgium as well as enabling new revenue streams to Concentra" said Koos Hussem, President and CEO of X-CAGO.

Het Belang van Limburg Archive will be made accessible via the Het Belang van Limburg website. The newspaper can be searched, viewed as originally printed in full color. Het Belang van Limburg archive provides researchers of all ages the opportunity to re-discover the headlines of yesterday as they were first reported; search through volumes of birth, death and marriage notices; read the editorials of previous eras and laugh at the ads of another time across a number of newspaper titles all in one website.

X-CAGO
Founded in 2000, X-CAGO is creating a worldwide online newspaper archive. The company uses a variety of world-class technologies to turn newspaper archives on microfilm or paper into high resolution, searchable, digital images on the Internet. X-CAGO provides revenue-producing solutions to organizations that hold valuable microform and paper archives, as well as to distributors of online content. Through partnerships with newspapers, media corporations, micropublishers and content distributors, X-CAGO is providing business solutions to enable publishers to create new revenue streams from archived materials. The company is headquartered in Roermond, The Netherlands with offices in Mountain Lakes, NJ USA.

Concentra
Concentra is one of the largest Belgian media companies with total assets as of December 31, 2002 of approximately Euro 286.9 (million) and total annual revenues of approximately Euro 166.6 (million).
For more information about Het Belang van Limburg, visit their web site at www.hbvl.be