Some observations about newspaper digitization, paywalls, and geographical locations.

aimeeandbeatles

watermelon
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Apr 5, 2007
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Well most of you know I'm pretty weird about getting newspaper articles for my website and I previously made a thread about how I kept hitting paywalls I didn't know were there. This is a thread about something a bit different.

I'm not sure if this is some form of confirmation bias, but I've noticed that digitized newspapers in Europe (except the U.K.) are more likely to be un-paywalled than those in North America. I always found this a little strange.

What are your thoughts on this?
 
I hate the notion of having to pay for any internet source. I would hope more US media sources would see it as a way of providing a public service instead of thinking of it as another revenue stream, or even as a way to recoup some of the costs.
 
It's espeically frustrating when the paywalls aren't even mentioned and you see a good article and click it and they make you pay. Arrrghhhghghgh.

Google was trying to digitize a bunch of newspapers and they had a pretty good service. But earlier this year they stopped doing it and they won't take any more microforms now. It's a same as a lot of those microforms are stuck away in warehouses and they're probably decaying or something. Plus its impractical for people to travel 3443292390049+ miles to go to a library. Though if you see an index with an article, I've had luck with emailing the library and asking if they would mind emailing it.

Theres one big project in the US going on, the National Digital Newspaper Project. But it only goes up to the 1920s which is before my scope. It's a good inititiat.. can't spell it. Also a lot of universities have digital archives on their site.
 
I'm sad that this topic isn't getting talked about. :(

Theres a nice big list of newspaper digitization projects here. You might see the phenomenon I'm talking about.
http://icon.crl.edu/digitization.htm
 
I was not talking about things being a right.
 
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