| 08 Sep 2008 - Modern Microfilm - the Library on your PC |
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| If you are like me, you'll remember the days when looking for old newspaper articles required you popping into a library or news archive, and searching through MICROFILM. You know, those greeting card sized films you put into a huge viewing machine to magnify the information on them? This was in the day, one way to store newspaper archives. Today, as with many things, Google has found a way to go one better. In fact many more than just one better. According to Google's official blog (Here), the GOOGLE NEWS ARCHIVE has started "Bringing History Online - one newspaper at a time" You see, this is the sort of technology that costs literally millions to develop, and that sort of development cost and quite frankly ability, is well out of reach of the biggest players, in news media let alone worldwide. But here is Google, enriching its dominance with another simply wonderful offering. I love it. I went to Google News today, searched for John F Kennedy Space thinking that should return some old articles. Clicked the '1960's' filter and saw a stack of articles. Some of them are web conversions, others are links to the GOOGLE NEWS ARCHIVE. Click those links and you jump into Googles very own MicroFilm viewer. Now there isn't a whole stack of papers online just yet, but give it time, Google don't do things in halves (just look at Streetview, they didn't settle for Sydney, Melbourne, they drove AUSTRALIA!). The Viewer shows the scanned version of the newspaper with, as you get with many web searches, the relevant words HIGHLIGHTED. This just amazes me, it truely is an amazing archive. The New York Times already has massive amounts of articles stored online in a web format, (ie: you don't SEE the original paper), and you have to pay to read the full version, but this really makes Google the world's Library. Love them or hate them, Google really are doing things that make information more accessible. Just think how much more amazing school projects will be for the kids in the future when they have this much information at their fingertips. Check it out, you'll be amazed CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE JFK ARTICLE I SEARCHED |
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