The E-Sylum:  Volume 9, Number 37, September 10, 2006, Article 3

GOOGLE's HISTORICAL NEWSPAPER SEARCH UNVEILED

Len Augsburger writes: "Google has added an historical
newspaper search, at archivesearch .

Silicon Valley's Mercury News reported that "After years of
barricading their digital doors against Google's wide-ranging Web
crawler, some of the country's largest media companies said they
had invited Google to include their online archives in its giant
index for Web searches.

Starting Tuesday at 9 p.m. PDT, articles published by news
organizations, including the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, Time and the Washington Post, will be available in the
archive of Google News.

"The goal is to help users explore history as it unfolded," said
Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google who worked on the archive
project.

The archive, which can be found by typing news.google.com/archivesearch
or through a link on news.google.com, will also include snippets of
news articles and other documents from research companies that
require paid subscriptions like LexisNexis, Factiva and HighBeam
Research.

To retrieve an entire document from any paid service, a person will
have to pay a fee."

"... Google has not yet made agreements with foreign news providers
to include their digital archives.

Google is also not including blogs, because of the dramatic differences
in quality that characterize work in the blogosphere. "Our goal is to
focus on history, and history has largely been recorded by traditional
news services," Acharya said."

To read the complete article, see: Full Story

Ed Snible writes: "A search for 'huey long washroom' turns up 153
hits, including a free story from the September 11, 1933 Time Magazine
Full Story.

The very first hit is from The Washington Post, September 21 1933,
covering the ANS presentation of the medal discussed so often on
The E-Sylum.  The Post charges $3.95 to read that story.

There are 322 hits for "Brasher Doubloon", the earliest mention known
to Google is from 1894 (!) and discusses Andrew Zabriski showing an
example at the ANS. Seems like a useful tool for historical research."

[I poked around and came across one item from August 25, 1908 referring
to a recent sale of a Higley copper: "From the New York Sun. If that
Connecticut blacksmith of colonial days, John Higley, could have seen
one of his much-berated copper three pence pieces of home manufacture
bring $275 at a coin sale in this city the other day, he would have
noted with great satisfaction, no doubt, that the injunction engraved
upon one of his coins -- "Value me as you please" -- had been
interpreted more liberally than he could have anticipated." -Editor]

Len Augsburger adds: "I typed in "Loubat", following up on Pete
Smith's article in the recent Asylum, and got the citations below,
among others.  Not everything is free - some of the articles are for
sale, but at least you can get an extract and decide before paying.

The Supreme Court article, for example, is $3.95, or there are various
packages with lower per article rates.  Of course if you have access
to a library with the same resources on microfilm, then you can look
for free.  The hard part is finding the citations, which Google is
giving away at no cost.

The Washington Post (1877-1954) - Washington, D.C.
Date: Dec 23, 1882
Start Page: 1
Document Types: front_page
Text Word Count: 240

NEW YORK, Dec. 22 -- Preliminary proceedings were had in the Supreme
court to-day in the suit of F.L. Loubat for reinstatement in the Union
club, whence he was expelled for conduct unbecoming a gentleman. The
treasurer of the Union was examined as to the facts in the case. He
was asked: "What conduct on the part of Mr. Loubat was improper or
prejudicial to the club?"

The Washington Post (1877-1954) - Washington, D.C.
Date: Apr 28, 1887
Start Page: 2
Document Types: article
Text Word Count: 293

Mr. Loubat, of the New York Union Club, is about to publish "The
Yachtman's Scrap book," his third literary venture.

[A very useful tool indeed.  This is a huge boon to numismatic
researchers and writers.  The hard part is learning that the
information exists, and the Google index helps with that chore
immensely.  What researcher worth their salt wouldn't cough up
the extra $3.95 to access a potentially valuable article?

On the down side, what I've found from poking around in the archive
is that a lot of the newspapers indexed have been scanned and OCRed
without human post-editing.  The Optical Character Recognition
quality leaves a LOT to be desired - a LOT, with many sections
reading as mere gibberish.  The terms you may be searching for
could be unfindable because of the OCR mangling.

Still, this tool is a HUGE advance for researchers.  Poke around
with your own favorite queries - let us know what numismatic nuggets
you find.  Who will be the first to report a startling previously-
unknown fact?   Gentlemen (and ladies!), start your search engines!
-Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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