Google has announced that it will shut down its News Archives project, an initiative aimed at digitizing the world’s newspapers and making them available online.
In an email sent to numerous partners including the Boston Phoenix, Google said it would no longer accept, scan, and index archival material from newspapers. The search giant will instead focus on “newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites.”
Google’s News Archives project began five years ago and currently has material from about 2,000 newspapers. Users will still be able to access and search for newspaper material at the News Archives website, but there will be no further updates or added functionality.
The fee Google would have charged newspapers to purchase the digital scans is now going to be waived. Also waived are the rights to use the material elsewhere with other partners.
I’m not surprised; it costs hundreds of thousands to digitize runs of individual newspapers. Libraries and archives, like the United States’ Library of Congress National Digital Newspaper Program, collaborate for grant money all the time, to pay for this. Here in Texas, we’re running the Texas Digital Newspaper Program, in conjunction with the NDNP, in order to put all Texas newspapers online, through http://tdnp.unt.edu. Google was having to compete with huge collaborative efforts while also having to chase down the content. With hope, publishers within individual states will know to contact their local university libraries and archives to place the content Google returns to them, online, in a speedy manner.Â