Google Comes Up With a Great Initiative for Historians - Scans Old Newspapers

Every now and then Google comes up with an idea that is absolutely marvelous and can only be implemented with the kind of financial, human and hardware power only the search giant has. These are the situations when I tend to remember the “do no evil” mantra as I understand that the company still strives to develop something useful for the mankind even without prospects of significant financial rewards.

This time the initiative is to have archives of over 100 newspapers Google has agreements with scanned and put online for anyone to access - for fun or for research. The searchable text articles from the old newspapers is accompanied by actual images and even ads from every particular issue of the newspaper the article is retrieved from.

Some of the content can only be viewed by paid subscribers but there is a special option to only search those articles that can be viewed for free. Publishers providing their content for free will be lured in by revenue sharing - Google displays some contextual ads from AdSense along the articles from old newspapers and publishers of those newspapers will get their share in this revenue.

For now there are no details on exactly what publications will be involved in the initiative and what the range of dates here will be. But Google has already scanned and uploaded a lot of newspaper pages that return numerous results for various historical events.

I don’t think it is actually wise to make users access the results of this initiative only by searching Google News archive or using the timeline feature in the same product. It seems to me a better idea could be to have such archive accessible as a separate product similar to Google books with unlimited paid subscriptions for research institutions). And if Google wants to make it easier to find this content, they could still integrate the results into Google News archieve search anyway - but I still feel such a product could benefit from a standalone position in the range of other Google products.

I remember when I researched for my final paper on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 in university, it was really a pain to find newspapers from the time with any articles related to the events in the Caribbean Sea - I spent days after days thumbing files of both Soviet and American newspapers looking for articles, photos and caricatures related to the event. I can imagine that if I had an opportunity to do it on a computer without having to drag multi-page files around the library, the process would have taken much less time and could reveal some things that I were unable to find when doing it manually.

One thing is obvious: this is a great tool for all researchers and anyone interested in history. And while there are some things to be done here (like adding the ability to copy some text from articles to use it as quotes - after all, if the text is searchable, it has already been recognized, I believe), this is the initiative that really makes me envy current generations of students since it does offer an opportunity to make their lives much easier.