Google, Old Newspapers, Sex Scandals, and Other Stuff of History

Kevin Maney writes: Google is getting some attention today for saying that it will step up efforts to digitize the archives of newspapers and make them searchable. As someone who wrote a biography of an historical business figure (Thomas Watson Sr., who built IBM), I was at first excited about this news. When doing any kind of historical research, I truly don't think that anything could be more enlightening -- and, especially, more helpful with context -- than easy access to newspapers on pertinent dates. Not only would it provide the details of the news as it was then known, but the rest of that day's newspaper tells you what else was happening, the weather that day, which team was in first place, and so on.

But it's hard to tell from what's available so far how this is going to turn out. For instance, I thought I'd check out archived stories about Gary Hart's legendary affair with Donna Rice. I could find the story as it appeared in The New York Times -- but just the story, not that day's newspaper. If I tried to pull up that same story from the Dallas Morning News or Philadelphia Inquirer, I just got an abstract with a notice that I had to pay to see the article.

Contrast that with a search for "Nixon resigns," and a click on the link to The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Fla. Now I have scanned images of the whole paper -- which is what seems the most useful. And it's free. Which of course makes it useful to students or others who don't want to pay $4 every time they look at an old story.

Bottom line: This effort right now is a big mixed bag and kind of a mess. I'd love to see Google convince papers like the Inquirer to give up the meager money they might get charging for ancient stories in exchange for, say, ad revenue from Google ads that appear when anyone pulls up those stories.

For anyone interested in historical research, this is worth watching.