Peter Sinclair: High hopes finally exceed hype

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"With the launch of ProQuest we are adding a whole new dimension to online research and learning ... "

For once on the net, reality promised to live up to the hype last week as the venerable New York Times announced that, in association with Bell & Howell's ProQuest Historical Newspapers Project, digital facsimiles of every page it has published since it first appeared in 1851 would become available on the web.

Under the terms of the deal, libraries and educational institutions will be able to mine a rich lode of historical and sociological information previously available only on microfiche or, sometimes, CD-Rom. For every issue will be printed from cover to cover - not just news and editorial, but graphics, photos, advertisements and classifieds.

"For the first time," says B&H chief executive and president Joe Reynolds, "researchers will be able to find history in its context, complete with long-forgotten news-items pertinent to the day."

The browseable archive, whose conversion into digital form will take about 15 months, will display keyword-defined material either full-page or as single features.

One drawback is that it will be made available by annual subscription only to controllable outlets like schools and libraries, a major inconvenience for most users.

A second era of newspaper experimentation on the net may be dawning at last, as 19th century organs seek new means of survival in the 21st. For the moment, vision is out, profitability in. Three major US newspaper companies - the Tribune, Knight Ridder and the New York Times - have been doling out pink slips to new-media employees as web advertising sagged from the middle of last year.

Eric K. Meyer of NewsLink Associates, which researches online journalism, makes the point that newspapers originally "were afraid to get left out of something that could be a billion-dollar business - now they're afraid to get left in something that could be an albatross round their neck."

But the systematic digitising of human history, long seen as one of the internet's most important goals, really seems to be underway at last. For the 100-year-old Nobel Foundation has also announced a partnership, with Cisco Systems, which will dramatically open its own archives to the internet.

Soon, any informed surfer will be able to test scientific hypotheses in a virtual laboratory scheduled to go online in April at www.nobel.org, or hear laureates read their own works and papers online.

Like many non-profit institutions, the foundation has been a technological mess.

Now, with Cisco donating equipment, know-how - and geeks - the Nobels are staking a claim to the online future.

Millions will be able to view a webcast of the December Nobel centennial awards celebration, to which all living laureates will be invited, rather like the Cisco-sponsored 1999 NetAid charity concert.

Best of all, unlike the archives of the New York Times, the intellectual and cultural core of the 19th and 20th centuries will soon be clickable to every websurfer.

Elitism, thankfully, is also out.

"In the old days," says Berkeley professor Daniel McFadden, an economics laureate last year, "the archives would be like rare book libraries - if you were a scholar and could convince them you were one of the anointed, you could look at it."

Today, like information, knowledge insists on being free.

* petersinclair@email.com


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Links


New York Times

Bell & Howell's ProQuest Historical Newspapers Project

NewsLink Associates

Nobel Foundation

Nobel Cisco Internet Initiative

NetAid charity concert

Raffy

My Cereal

Customatix