With Google’s goal of organizing the world’s information, it was only a matter of time before it decided to pry open the newspaper archives. That time is now. Google is partnering with publishers to digitize millions of old newspaper pages.

For lots of people that’s big news because as more pages become available, the history of humanity’s every day lives will be instantly accessible. It’s almost like bringing all of the journalists of the past into realm of bloggers, where their content is almost instantly indexed and searchable.

Google plans to make the text available, as well as original scans with all formatting intact, according to a company blog post. That means people familiar with typesetting and stylistic nuances of each time period will be able to infer additional information, as long as the scans are hi-res enough.

The content from these newspapers won’t be restricted to an archive search page forever though. The company plans to gradually integrate the content with search results initiated using its main search engine. Talk about expanding its reach!

This isn’t the first initiative to digitize newspapers though,

This effort expands on the contributions of others who’ve already begun digitizing historical newspapers. In 2006, we started working with publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post to index existing digital archives and make them searchable via the Google News Archive. Now, this effort will enable us to help you find an even greater range of material from newspapers large and small, in conjunction with partners such as ProQuest and Heritage, who’ve joined in this initiative.

We live in an age of recorded and transferable information and anyone who wants to stay “off the grid” will continue to encounter more difficulty. Hopefully as new technologies continue to make more content available, a parallel path develops that allows us to effectively control how that information is used.

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Entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 7:09 pm under Google, Internet.  Print This Post

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