Google Inc has stepped up efforts to digitize dozens of historical newspapers and make scanned images of the original papers available online, the Internet search leader said on Monday.

In a blog post on the Silicon¹ Valley-based company's website, Google said it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

The effort involves the archives of dozens of newspaper titles and expands on a two-year-old effort by Google to work with two major US newspapers -- The New York Times and Washington Post -- to index old papers in Google News Archive.

"Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse² through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all," Google product manager Punit Soni said in the blog post.

The new papers range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "the first newspaper West of the Alleghenies" (the Allegheny Mountains), to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting³ paper.

The additional newspapers allow readers to see how newspapers of bygone days covered historical events.

As an example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's coverage⁴ of Neil Armstrong's (and Edwin Aldrin's) 1969 moon walk can be found at http://tinyurl.com/man-on-the-moon/.

The initial newspaper partners for the digital archiving program are located in the United States and Canada, a spokesman said.

"The goal is no different than Google Book Search," company spokesman Gabriel Stricker said, referring to Google's broad-based effort to work with major academic libraries around the world to scan older, out-of-print books. "It is just getting a lot of published offline content online."

互联网搜索引擎巨头Google公司于本周一宣布，目前Google正加大力度，为旧报纸数据化项目做各项准备，以后经过扫描的原版旧报纸在网络上也可以找到了。

总部位于硅谷的Google公司网站上的一篇博客中提到，目前Google正与各大报社合作，旨在通过对旧报纸进行数字化处理，从而使它们进入网络搜索。

Google将收录多家报纸的档案内容，继续扩展旧报纸检索的“新闻档案”业务。Google此前与美国两大报业——《纽约时报》和《华盛顿邮报》已经合作两年。

Google公司产品经理普尼特•索尼在博客中写道：“今后你不仅可以在网上搜到这些老报纸，而且还能看到它们原始的印刷版的样子，包括图片、标题、文章和广告等所有内容。”

目前，不少报纸参与了这一项目，从“阿勒格尼山脉以西的第一份报纸”《匹兹堡邮政公报》，到已有244年历史的北美最古老的报纸《魁北克编年电讯报》都将现身网络。

此外，这些网络版的老报纸还能让读者看到报纸当年是如何报道那些历史事件的。

比如，《匹兹堡邮政公报》1969年刊登的一篇关于尼尔•阿姆斯特朗（和埃德文•欧德林）在月球上行走的报道现在就可以在http://tinyurl.com/man-on-the-moon/上看到。

一位发言人称，首批参与报纸数字化合作项目的大多是美国和加拿大的报纸。

Google公司发言人加布里埃尔•斯特里克说：“该项目的目标与Google图书索引没什么区别，都是将线下出版物上网。”Google图书搜索项目工程浩大，主要通过与全球各大学术图书馆合作，对那些年代久远的绝版书籍进行扫描处理。