First, congrats to Google on the massive increase (4x bigger but exact numbers were not given) to their newspaper digitization project. Well done and we look forward to more in the future. That said, may we ask a small favor? How about a list, a catalog of sorts, of the newspapers you’re making available via the project. It would be most welcome. As more papers get digitized you can simply add the titles and/or change the run dates. Heck, you can limit by newspaper* on the advanced search interface but where does one go to find the list of papers? How can one limit by date if we don’t know what date range is available? We believe this is info that should be on the search interface home page or if that’s not possible it could be placed on one of your well documented help pages.

* On the newspaper archive advanced search page Google lists NewsBank as a newspaper source. It’s not. NewsBank is an aggregator of newspapers.

Looking for More Digitized Newspapers?

Check out the Chronicling America Project from the Library of Congress. They just digitized their one millionth page. Free.

Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program
4.3 million articles (1.95 million scanned pages) are now available and full-text searchable. Some of the material is accessible via Google’s Newspaper Digitization program.

New Zealand: Papers Past
Over 1.3 million digitized newspaper pages. Free.

NewspaperARCHIVE.com
Fee-based (monthly or yearly subscription) from Heritage Microfilm. According to their documentation NA is adding about 2.5 million pages per month. Recently, they added the Stars and Stripes newspaper from 1948-1999.

UK: The Times of London (1785-1985)
Fee-Based.

British Newspapers 1800-1900
2 million pages. Fee-based.

Many libraries (of all types) provide FREE remote (access from home, office) access to digitized newspapers. Just ask your librarian.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 and is filed under Digitization Projects, Information Industry, News Search, Search Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.