Newspapers are being battered financially everywhere. Several major newspapers have folded in recent years, usually after suffering losses of millions of dollars. However, as Emily Lambert writes in Forbes, many newspapers are overlooking a great asset that can produce significant revenue: placing their archives online.
News libraries contain a rich trove of history, of interest to everyone from genealogists to historians to casual readers. So the idea, of course, is to charge those readers for access to the newspaper archives.
In fact, some libraries are now considering disposing of their copies of old newspapers. Those stacks of old papers consume a lot of space, which is expensive for any library. Libraries find that online archives are more efficient, easier to use, cheaper, and serve their patrons better than do shelves and shelves of old newspapers. Once properly scanned, converted to text by OCR processes, and indexed, anyone can find any article in old newspapers within a minute or so. Searching through physical newspapers requires far more time.
You can read the full story in Forbes at http://goo.gl/RXIyl
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