Google擬讓更多老報紙“上網”

Google Inc has stepped up efforts to digitize dozens of historicAl newspapers and make scanned images of the original papers available online, the Internet search leader said on Monday.

In a blog post on the Silicon Valley-based company's website, Google said it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

The effort involves the archives of dozens of newspaper titles and expands on a two-year-old effort by Google to work with two major US newspapers -- The New York Times and Washington Post -- to index old papers in Google News Archive.

"Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all," Google product manager Punit Soni said in the blog post.

The new papers range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "the first newspaper West of the Alleghenies" (the Allegheny Mountains), to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting paper.

The additional newspapers allow readers to see how newspapers of bygone days covered historical events.

As an example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage of Neil Armstrong's (and Edwin Aldrin's) 1969 moon walk can be found at .

The initial newspaper partners for the digital archiving program are located in the United States and Canada, a spokesman said.

"The goal is no different than Google Book Search," company spokesman Gabriel Stricker said, referring to Google's broad-based effort to work with major academic libraries around the world to scan older, out-of-print books. "It is just getting a lot of published offline content online."

互聯網搜索引擎巨頭Google公司於本週一宣佈，目前Google正加大力度，爲舊報紙數據化項目做各項準備，以後經過掃描的原版舊報紙在網絡上也可以找到了。

總部位於硅谷的Google公司網站上的一篇博客中提到，目前Google正與各大報社合作，旨在通過對舊報紙進行數字化處理，從而使它們進入網絡搜索。

Google將收錄多家報紙的檔案內容，繼續擴展舊報紙檢索的“新聞檔案”業務。Google此前與美國兩大報業——《紐約時報》和《華盛頓郵報》已經合作兩年。

Google公司產品經理普尼特•索尼在博客中寫道：“今後你不僅可以在網上搜到這些老報紙，而且還能看到它們原始的印刷版的樣子，包括圖片、標題、文章和廣告等所有內容。”

目前，不少報紙參與了這一項目，從“阿勒格尼山脈以西的第一份報紙”《匹茲堡郵政公報》，到已有244年曆史的北美最古老的報紙《魁北克編年電訊報》都將現身網絡。

此外，這些網絡版的老報紙還能讓讀者看到報紙當年是如何報道那些歷史事件的。

比如，《匹茲堡郵政公報》1969年刊登的一篇關於尼爾•阿姆斯特朗（和埃德文•歐德林）在月球上行走的報道現在就可以在上看到。

一位發言人稱，首批參與報紙數字化合作項目的大多是美國和加拿大的報紙。

Google公司發言人加布裏埃爾•斯特里克說：“該項目的目標與Google圖書索引沒什麼區別，都是將線下出版物上網。”Google圖書搜索項目工程浩大，主要通過與全球各大學術圖書館合作，對那些年代久遠的絕版書籍進行掃描處理。