Google has stepped up efforts to digitise dozens of historical newspapers and make scanned images of the original papers available online, the Internet search leader said on Monday, according to a Reuters report.
Some details:
In a blog post on the Silicon Valley-based company's website, Google said it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitise millions of pages of news archives. "Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all," Google product manager Punit Soni said in the blog post.
The effort involves the archives of dozens of newspaper titles and expands on a two-year-old effort by Google to work with two major U.S. newspapers -- the New York Times and Washington Post -- to index old papers in Google News Archive. The new papers range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting paper.
"The goal is no different than Google Book Search," company spokesman Gabriel Stricker said, referring to Google's broad-based effort to work with major academic libraries around the world to scan older, out-of-print books. "It is just getting a lot of published offline content online."
