By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: September 8, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — Google has begun scanning microfilm from some
newspapers' historic archives to make them searchable online, first
through Google News and eventually on the papers' own Web sites, the
company said Monday.
The new program expands a two-year-old service that allows Google News
users to search the archives of some major newspapers and magazines,
including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time, that were
already available in digital form. Readers will be able to search the
archives using keywords and view articles as they appeared originally in
the print pages of newspapers.
Under the expanded program, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing
newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning
project. Google angered some book publishers because it had failed to
seek permission to scan books that were protected by copyrights. It will
obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., will place advertisements
alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with
newspaper publishers.
Initially, the archives will be available through Google News, but the
company plans to give newspapers a way to make their archives available
on their own sites.
"This is really good for newspapers because we are going to be bringing
online an old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as
widening the reader base of news archives," said Marissa Mayer, vice
president for search products and user experience at Google.
But many newspaper publishers view search engines like Google as threats
to their own business. Many of them also see their archives as a
potential source of revenue, and it is not clear whether they will
willingly hand them over to Google.
"The concern is that Google, in making all of the past newspaper content
available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals
have commoditized current news content," said Ken Doctor, an analyst
with Outsell, a research company.
Google said it was working with more than 100 newspapers and with
partners like Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate
historical newspaper archives in microfilm. It has already scanned
millions of articles.
Other companies are already working with newspapers to digitize archives
and some sell those archives to schools, libraries and other
institutions, helping newspapers earn money from their historical content.
The National Digital Newspaper Program, a joint program of the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is creating a
digital archive of historically significant newspapers published in the
United States from 1836 to 1922. It will be freely accessible on the
Internet.
Newspapers that are participating in the Google program say it is
attractive.
"We wouldn't be talking about digitization if Google had not entered
this arena," said Tim Rozgonyi, research editor at The St. Petersburg
Times. "We looked into it years back, and it appeared to be exceedingly
costly."
Mr. Rozgonyi said that the newspaper might be able to generate
additional revenue from the digital archives by producing historical
booklets or commemorative front pages. But he said that increasing sales
was not the primary objective of the digitization program.
"Getting the digitized content available is a wonderful thing for people
of this area," he said. "They'll be able to go to our site or Google's
and tap into 100 years of history."
Pierre Little, publisher of The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has
been published since 1764 and calls itself "North America's Oldest
Newspaper," said many readers visit the newspaper's Web site to look for
obituaries and conduct research on their ancestors.
"We could envision that thousands of families would be attracted to our
archives to search for people who came over to the New World," Mr.
Little said. "We hope that will be a financial windfall for us."
Brad Stone contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/technology/09google.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y&oref=slogin
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