Today Google announced that it has added a searchable 200+ year archive to Google News.

On the plus side:

• You’re searching a huge amount of articles going back many years from sources such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Factiva, LexisNexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale, among others.
• On the left-hand side your hits are grouped by date, and Google provides a blue arrow indicating a year of special interest concerning your search term. In this search for Mark McGwire, the arrow is next to 1998.
• You can also view your hits as a timeline.

And the negative?

• There’s no universal access — some of the articles are free, many are fee-based.
• Depending on the sources you wish to access, you may have to set up an account with more than one content provider.

Libraries have been offering free remote access to interesting and useful databases for awhile now. It’s not front page news. But let Google launch a news archive and I hear about it at 6:00 am on KYW 1060. As a librarian, I get an idea of how it must feel to be a mom-and-pop store fending off Wal-Mart.

Go to your public library’s Web site — you’ll be surprised at the resources that are available to you if you have a library card. (Some libraries let you sign up for one online.) If you’re a Jenkins member, you have remote access to 2 great archives: NewsBank (590 newspapers going back 20 years) and InfoTrac OneFile (25 years’ worth of magazine and journal articles.)

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
on September 06, 2006 - 3:44 pm

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