It’s the modern-day equivalent of Hemingway leaving his manuscript on the train. As many great contributions to public scholarship as Google has initiated, it has also abandoned programs with ease and without easy recourse for dependent customers. This is, on the one hand, a story about how a free database challenged the business model of a company that trades archiving services for subscription fees.īut it’s also a warning to researchers like Takach about the perils of reliance on digital storage. Still, it’s a reminder, she said, of “how fragile these things can be if suddenly access is declined.” She says she is exploring what partner institutions might aid the library in purchasing the rights. Kiely expects the end result will be a kind of paid subscription service, and likely one of higher quality than Google’s offering, which was incomplete. But moving from a searchable, digitized archive to microfilm with a partial card catalog index, wrote one local researcher, was like going from playing chess on the internet to playing chess via the U.S. The newspapers are still accessible on microfilm, of course, at the research libraries of the University of Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Public Library. “It’s a handicap, a paralysis, to lose all those links and those resources,” he says. That history-digitized and made searchable by the Google News Archive, a project the internet giant began in 2006-was indispensable for Takach when he was working on his book LGBT Milwaukee.Īnd then, last week, it all vanished without warning. “Each one of those was linked to a story I wanted to tell from Milwaukee’s past,” says the volunteer historian. Michail Takach had bookmarked hundreds of articles and images from the archives of Milwaukee’s two big newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel, which merged in 1995 to become the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
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