Newspaper Scans

Posted on September 9, 2008

Google has started another ambitious effort. They’ve been busy digitizing the world’s books, and now they are starting to do the same for historical newspapers, of course making the archives available for searching online.

Most newspapers keep archives of past issues, sometimes in vaults and often on microfiche. Putting them online, however, remains an expensive and time-consuming task for many organizations, and money is where Google comes in. Plus, they are able to quickly undertake such a task, given their current print digitizing tools.

In addition to several major literary collections, the company has previously worked with the New York Times and Washington Post to put their back catalogues online.

Initially, the project will focus on major news headlines. Eventually, however, Google plans to have the newspaper content indexed alongside regular news content, allowing users to pull up the archived articles alongside other Google news items.

There are some archives online now from other sources, though most are available only through some form of subscription. Google, per usual, intends to give access at no charge.