Slashdot Mirror
Bringing the Library of Congress Newspapers Online
smooth wombat writes "If you want to read a newspaper article from sometime in the past (say 1920 for example) your only options right now are to go to your local library and hope they have a microfiche file of that paper or take a visit to Washington, DC and the Library of Congress. That may soon change. CNN is reporting that by 2006 the government will have the first of 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 which will be available to anyone who has a connection to the net. The project is a joint cooperation between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923."
Seeing that Google has been searching on 8 billion pages, these 30 million seems pretty insignificant in terms of volume, but I'm not so sure about the significance of the content, what did they write/read in 19th Century?
I wonder how many people will actually wait for Google/MSN to index them and search from there.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
How useful will this be? If you do not know the date and the page of the article you will not be able to easly find it.
Yah, you can page through the archives, but I am sure that these are not small images to look at and and band width is valuable.
And once thay scan it into didgital format, THEY will have copyright over the Scanned image. What kind of restrictions will they place over their new property?
I wouldn't doubt that their are strings attached.