In a move that may turn microfilm into a quaint relic of the past, Google has increased efforts to digitize newspaper archives and avail scanned versions online.

Dozens of newspaper titles are involved in the project, including The New York Times and the Washington Post. Both formed relationships with Google in 2006.

Another partner in the project is the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, the oldest newspaper in North America — published continuously since 1764, boasts Google in a blog post about the initiative.

Because articles are scanned, material is shown exactly as printed, including photographs, headlines, articles, and advertisements. ProQuest was chosento help aggregate text content for search purposes.

Users may access the content through Google News search via the archives feature, or through the news timeline, which will have a list of earlier articles.

To protect the interest of newspapers, not all articles are available on a complimentary basis, ArsTechnica found. Several searches, depending on the combination of newspaper and date, required a fee to view. For example, a search for La Casa Nostra in the 1960s brings up news articles from The New York Times — some of which costs $3.95 to view.

Two years ago, Google had to settle with a Belgian newspaper copyright group and remove links to proprietary content.
Back on US soil, Google is preparing an enormous endeavor to digitize older, out-of-print texts from academic libraries and make them searchable via Google Book Search. Compensation for the effort will come in the form of rights: to index and search all digitized content at no charge.