Google Abandons Plan To Archive World's Newspapers 60
An anonymous reader writes "Throughout the past few years, Google's newspaper-scanning project has digitized more than 60 million pages from newspapers spanning 250 years, including such gems as the moon landing. But according to the Boston Phoenix, this ambitious effort is slated to soon be axed in favor of Google One Pass, a platform for publishers to monetize content from their own sites."
Re:Short-sighted... (Score:2, Interesting)
In socialist Germany we have a government-run library that archives all German-language print-publications. Submission is mandatory (with a few excepts for low print runs and the likes). No need to rely on the good-will of short-lived corporations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_Library
Re:Short-sighted... (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny story about that... A friend of mine was studying old newspapers in the microfilm collection at his university, and found that several key issues of one paper were missing. He didn't think this would be a problem, as it was a semi-important newspaper and was thus archived at multiple libraries across the state. So off he went to the other libraries and found the same dates missing in every library. He checked a couple of out-of-state libraries... and no matter where he checked they were all missing the same issues.
Turns out one company had microfilmed one libraries collection - and the others had all bought the microfilm and trashed their paper copies and nobody had ever actually verified that the microfilm represented a complete run.
So, just because the "backups" are distributed is no guarantee they are complete.