Home page > History & Chronology > Google shuts down newspaper archive project

Google shuts down newspaper archive project

Tuesday 24 May 2011

Source: The Atlantic.

After three years, Google announced today that it would shutter its ongoing quest to scan and archive printed newspapers. Google’s News Archive, which has scanned nearly a million pages from 2,000 newspapers into an easily browsable database since 2008, was among the most ambitious attempts to record and archive newspapers in their printed form. While Journalism.net keeps a running list of digital newspaper troves around the world, the News Archive was the first major attempt to centralize digital scans of old broadsheets in a single, searchable archive.

The end of Google’s News Archive won’t be the end of digitized broadsheets. The New York Times, noticeably absent from the project, recently unveiled its TimesMachine engine, which allows readers to browse and read any issue of the of the Times from September 18, 1951 to December 30, 1922. But the service was an incredible resource for smaller publications which lacked the resources to undertake an extensive — and expensive — digitization process.

Reply to this news item

SPIP | template | | Site Map | Tree | Follow-up of the site's activity RSS 2.0