Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Google and newspapers

The world seems abuzz today since Google announced it has worked deals with Heritage Micrographics and ProQuest to digitize historic newspapers. The New York Times ran a story about it and Google blogged about it.

The question becomes: what does this do for those of us who already digitize historic newspapers? Will it stifle our work? Will it fill in the gaps we haven't digitized yet? Will Google guarantee the preservation of the digitized newspaper images? The list of questions is nearly endless.

What do you think?

3 comments:

Laura said...

Hi UK folks! This is indeed an interesting development for NDNP. If at the very least I think this means we should be more vigilant about making sure the WorldCat records of our titles are updated with URLs to the Chronicling America sites.

EWS said...

I can't say I'm surprised by this. Google loves to dabble. While it seems they are focusing on major titles, we can only hope that this turns out better than Google Books.

Becky Ryder said...

Very interesting that ProQuest and Heritage are collaborating with Google. This could breathe new life into the film sales business. Since Google can only reveal snippets of copyrighted material, once patrons find something they want to read, they will need to seek out the film at local repositories or perhaps purchase it from ProQuest or Heritage. Should that be a motivation for us to delve into our copyrighted material?????