[WEB4LIB] Google News -> Usenet archive completion

[Richard Wiggins]

The NY Times had a small piece on this, noting that Google had managed to cobble together the collection of Usenet postings back to 1981 through its solicitation for content archives from the Usenet community.  There were a couple of companies that built CD-ROM archives of Usenet traffic over the years and it seems Google merged together content stored in people's basements to make a complete corpus.

This is a really positive story for digital preservation.  Google deserves high praise for this, I think.  I'm not sure how much more money is in it for Google having done this, but a unified, complete archive is worth a lot in terms of history.

/rich

On Tue, 11 December 2001, "gary price" wrote:
 
> 
> Google claims:
> Over 2 billion web pages (html, pdf, other formats)
> 7 million Usenet posts and 3 million images.
> 
> Also, the Google Groups feature is now out of beta and contains Usenet
> postings back to May, 1981.
 

Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com       www.richardwiggins.com