Why choose METS/ALTO for newspaper digitization?

Many benefits come with conforming to recognized standards like METS and ALTO, as used by existing, well-established projects.

The long-term sustainability of your digital objects is greatly enhanced. If METS/ALTO ever becomes obsolete it is certain that a suitable migration path will be developed for the many hundreds of millions of digitized pages already in this format, for large projects at the Library of Congress and elsewhere.
If it’s ever desirable to share content between projects it’s easy to do so, when those projects use the same open standards.
Projects using METS/ALTO benefit from the knowledge and tools created by/for other projects using the same standards.

In addition to the above METS/ALTO is simply a better, richer format for capturing digitized newspapers than any currently available alternative.

Not only does ALTO store the full-text content of each page and word, it also captures structural information like column, line, and word locations.
METS has the capability to support article segmentation, so articles, headlines, bylines, and other article-level metadata can be captured.
The combination of METS and ALTO captures very “rich” data, allowing the development of innovative discovery and delivery interfaces.
Both METS and ALTO are open XML standards — no proprietary software is required to read or transform the digitized objects.