"Google Archive Decision 'Astonishing'" Says Founder of ColdNorthWind and PaperofRecord.com
From an Article by Vito Pilieci, Ottawa Citizen:
“It’s disappointing, especially when you consider what I thought that this would do,” said Bob Huggins, former chief executive officer and cofounder of PaperOfRecord. com, which Google bought in 2008. He called Google’s decision to abandon the initiative “astonishing.” PaperofRecord.com, formerly called Cold North Wind, was founded over a meal in a Mexican restaurant on Bank Street in 1999.
[Clip]
In buying the company, Google said it would be a key part of its plans to organize the world’s information. It added other newspapers, including the Citizen, to the archive. Last week, however, Google said it will no longer be providing new features or content for Google News Archives. Existing content will remain online, it said.
[Clip]Huggins suggested that Google should partner with public-sector institutions, such as the Library of Congress in the United States, to continue the newspaper digitization effort. “They need to give their head a shake here and realize they have some public responsibility,” he added. “For a company that said they wanted to organize all of the world’s data, what happened to that mandate?”
Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Resources
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.