Peter Griffin: Yesterday's news dusted off for internet

When I worked on the New Zealand Herald, every so often I'd venture into the seldom visited, junk-filled little room that holds the paper's entire archive on microfilm. I'd spool to 1886, or 1932 or 1974, twisting the knobs to focus the dim screen.

We shouldn't have to make our way to the microfilm reader every time we want to check out coverage of an historic event and thankfully, the people at Google feel the same way. Google News service will now trawl the digitised records of newspapers, some of which stretch back 200 years.

The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and Time are among the heavy hitters indexed. You can now search for the exact text of what was published about an event when it happened.

Time magazine generously gives free access to articles from the 20th century which are searchable through the Google News search engine. There's that fascinating issue from January, 1939, the one in which Hitler graced the front cover as Man of the Year.

"An ancient pomp stalked across Europe last week. Formalities and trappings moved up and down the continent. Adolf Hitler, the most grandiose tourist of all time, took a trip", reported Time on November 4, 1940, by which stage Hitler's real intentions for Europe had been bared to the world. All the big news stories of history are there - the moon landing, John F. Kennedy's assassination, the eyewitness reports of the D-Day landings.

Key "New Zealand" into the archives and the pickings are slim - just the occasional mention in big US or European papers from time to time.

"Kiwis sink Conner in a titanic rout," proclaims the Washington Post of May 14, 1995. "Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing reach the top," graced the front page of Britain's Guardian newspaper on June 2, 1953.

An interesting Time article from November, 1961 covers Prime Minister Keith Holyoake's announcement of the discovery of a major natural gas field at Kapuni.

"The American farmer, if he is wise, will keep a sharp lookout for agricultural developments in the antipodes," reads a report in the Washington Post dated June 9, 1926 and titled: Rivalry of New Zealand.

There are many more references to New Zealand, but they are scattergun. The sooner we punch terms into the Google search engine and trawl through the old archives of the Herald, Dominion, Evening Post and the Press, the better.

The one drawback in Google's plundering of old newspaper archives is that many of the articles recovered by the search engine can only be read in their entirety if you pay between US$2 (NZ$3) and US$5 (NZ$7.50) in most cases.

The Herald archives are only digitised back to the mid-1990s and that also goes for most other New Zealand papers. Digitizing all this content for an internet audience would be a major undertaking, but create a valuable resource for the country.

In another smart move, Google has revamped its Google Books service which trawls the texts of thousands of books according to key word searches.

You can now download the entire text of books that are out of copyright in a format that makes them easy to read on your computer screen.

Shakespeare's plays, collected in 15 volumes and published in 1793, are free to download, with each volume consisting of a 20MB PDF file.