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Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages

Posted by kdawson on from the all-the-news-that-fits-we-print dept.

hhavensteincw writes "On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. 'Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,' Google said in a blog post. 'It's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.' For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon." When you search the news archive for, e.g., "Chicago fire" or "Rosenberg trial," a significant fraction of the result pages cost money to view.

3 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. At last! by telchine · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I welcome this news. For too long, research on the Internet has been a frustrating task. For any events after about 1997, there's oodles of information. However there's a giant hole in the amount of information available for events before then. Google Books went some way towards addressing this, but it was still an intense task because a lot of the time, you still have to find and buy the books (or find them in a Library).

    I really hope they plan to go as far as putting local, regional newspapers online as well.

  2. At last, something GOOD, from Google! by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At last, something that looks really GOOD, from Google! With free access, this will really change the world, even more.

    History revisionists will find it even more difficult to dupe.

    Maybe there are serious drawbacks, but, for the time I cannot see anything but the positive aspects.

    1. Re:At last, something GOOD, from Google! by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Maybe there are serious drawbacks

      There are serious drawbacks, but mostly they aren't actually Google's fault.
       
      The problem is, this kind of preservation costs serious money - so it's only done once from one master. Then that one master is distributed widely.
       
      An anecdote from the early 90's, when moving newspaper archives onto microfiche really got started in a serious way. A friend was doing research for a college thesis, and the microfiche copy at his university of an obscure and long defunct western paper was missing a page (a page of the newspaper had been lost sometime in the past and thus was not in the microfiche copy) - the precise page he needed in fact. So he called around and got photocopies (real photocopies back then) from other universities whose libraries held microfiche copies of that newspaper.
       
        Each and every one of them was missing the same page.
       
      Turns out one library had paid to have their archives copied onto microfiche - and then recouped their costs by selling copies. Each and every library that had held dead tree copies had replaced them with this microfiche and then heaved the hardcopies into the dumpster.
       
      That page is now forever lost to history.