Tuesday, September 18, 2007

new york times open access

The story of the day seems to be about the NY Times opening up its archives. So far I've seen postings at boing boing, if:book, open access news, o'reilly radar, and teleread.

So why am I bothering to blog this? Because this made me think about something I blogged about some months ago -- Google News Archive Search. One of the things that galled me at the time was how much of what they indexed was behind a pay firewall. Now, the NY Times is opening almost all their content up (save for 1923-1986), making this a more useful service, at least for resources from one newspaper. If only there wasn't so much other for-fee public domain newspaper content controlled through ProQuest Archiver. I still hope for an OpenURL Resolver service so authorized users can get to authorized resources at ProQuest Historical Newspapers instead.

1 comment:

Jonathan Rochkind said...

Glad you mentioned the technological possibility of OpenURL here.

Unfortunately, I don't hold out much hope that Google will add it to News, if they haven't by now.

While there are some technical issues in making OpenURL work usefully here, if it was in Google's interests to do so, they aren't so great that something useful couldn't be done. But I guess Google wouldnt' get much out of it--and it may even hurt their interests, to the extent they might have deals with (or just want to keep happy) the content providers that want to sell this content to users, rather than have users realize it's already licensed for them by their library.

There may be some promise in a Greasemonkey/LibX type solution that doesn't require Google's participation--but does require the user to be using Firefox, and to install a custom plugin.