Monday, September 08, 2008

Google partnering with ProQuest & Heritage to digitize newspapers (oh...and ProQuest already has access to a lot of newspaper content)

Google is expanding its digitization efforts with this announcement:
Today, we're launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.
Google explains that this effort will be a partnership:
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.
mmm...and ProQuest now owns Dialog, which likely has one of the largest newspaper repositories already. I wonder if that will somehow get factored in? One of the questions I posed in June was:
Wouldn't it be interesting if they -- at some point -- bought and added Dialog's files to its service?
Let's keep our eyes on this and see what develops!


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4 comments:

Raymond McInnis said...

jill, i use newspaperarchive.com freqently for my history of woodworking website.

www.woodworkinghistory.com

the newspaperarchive.com database, i suspect, is much larger than proquest, at least in coverage of the 20th century


it is especially good for different types of info on electric tools.

what impact, do you suppose, google will have up newspaperarchive.com?

Jill Hurst-Wahl said...

Raymond, notice who owns the Newspaper Archive -- Heritage -- the other partner in this project. I'll continue my comment in other blog post.

Raymond McInnis said...

Jill, that someone like myself -- retired academic reference librarian -- can access with such ease the texts of a multitude of newspapers is nirvana.

i started in the profession in the '60s, where getting students to look at microfilm of old newspapers was a struggle.

now, I personally can access the contents from my den at home -- quite a change.

if google uses the same policy on newspapers as it does on google scholar, the prospect is freebie newspapers. am i correct?

Jill Hurst-Wahl said...

Yes, the prospect is free access to a newspaper content through Google.