[WEB4LIB] Re: Google News -> Usenet archive completion

[gary price]

Here is a bit more on the Google Usenet Archive.
>From Wired News.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49016,00.html

>From the article,
"It's a historian's dream of primary sources," Patrick Venner, a research
librarian, said. "Documents written by people who were actually there
participating, often right in the thick of it, as history was happening.
What an incredible resource. Two decades of history, and you can search
through it with a single click instead of pawing hopefully through a box of
moldy papers. "

Also from the article, "The timeline is very much a work in progress and
Google is asking people who discover other "noteworthy historical posts
while mining the archive," to please forward those links by e-mail."
usenet-timeline at google.com


cheers,
gary




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Gary D. Price, MLIS
Librarian
Gary Price Library Research and Internet Consulting
gprice at gwu.edu
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dobbs, Aaron" <DobbsA at apsu.edu>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 5:42 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Google News -> Usenet archive completion


> I'm just glad I had a really obscure username back then :-)'
> I feel bad for the people that actually used names traceable to their real
> life today.
> -Aaron
> :-)'
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Wiggins [mailto:rich at richardwiggins.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 4:38 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Google News -> Usenet archive completion
>
>
>
> 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
>