December 2, 2008 Google Buys Digital Historical Newspaper Archives from PaperofRecord.comGoogle has completed the purchase of 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages from PaperofRecord.com. The two have had an agreement for two years and has now concluded in a sale that was voted on by shareholders of PaperofRecord's parent company, Cold North Wind, Inc.
This should be quite an asset to Google's historical newspaper initiative, announced in September.
PaperofRecord is based in Canada and was the first to digitize the entire history of the Toronto Star. In addition to digitizing newspapers in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe, PaperofRecord has digitized historical documents including he Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's longest serving Prime Minister.
"It is a bittersweet day for PaperofRecord.com. We are very pleased to have our legacy and vision of a 500 year, global, multiple language newspaper historical archive being placed in the stewardship of Google. As a Canadian entrepreneur, it is disappointing to not be able to muster the resources in our country to bring such a digital resource to its fruition at home. However, without the help and vision of a company such as Google, this immense, global, educational resource would not be possible on the scale that is being contemplated," said R.J (Bob) Huggins, Founder and CEO of PaperofRecord.com.
Posted by Nathania Johnson at December 2, 2008 10:00 AM




Comments (1)
To Our Library Community,
Thank you for your continuing patience as we bring PaperofRecord.com back online. PaperofRecord.com has recently concluded an exclusive distribution agreement with World Vital Records of Provo, Utah a division of Familylink.com.
FamilyLink.com, Inc. has more than 15 million unique global visitors each month and 40 million page views per month. With more than 31 million users We’re Related is the fastest growing social network for families and genealogists. We’re Related, a top-five application on Facebook, allows individuals to find relatives on Facebook, connect with friends and family members, build family trees, and share news and photos. It is the most popular family application on Facebook. Since October 2007, when the application was launched, more than 150 million relationships (of living people) have been defined on We’re Related. Within the past 30 days, the application has had 14.9 million monthly active users and 1,000,000 daily active users.
WorldVitalRecords.com provides affordable access to genealogy databases and family history tools used by more than 258,000 monthly visitors. The site registers 3.6 million monthly pages views and serves tens of thousands of paying subscribers. With thousands of databases—including birth, death, military, census, and parish records—WorldVitalRecords.com makes it easy to fill in missing information in your family tree. Some of its partners include Everton Publishers, Quintin Publications, Archive CD Books Australia, Gould Genealogy, Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, Archive CD Books Canada, The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., SmallTownPapers®, Accessible Archives, Genealogical Publishing Company, Find My Past, Godfrey Memorial Library, Find A Grave, and FamilySearch.
I encourage you to contact Scott Spencer at Scott@familylink.com to access our critically successful database of Historical Newspaper Images at the site that began it all, PaperofRecord.com!
Best
R.J. (Bob) Huggins
Founder
PaperofRecord.com