What's an Old Newspaper Really Worth?

Advertisement, 1764Without the archives from the 16th Century, this is all but worthless:

The British Library said Wednesday it was digitizing up to 40 million pages of newspapers, including fragile dailies dating back three and a half centuries.

Once digitized, the British newspapers documenting local, regional and national life spanning to the 1700s will be fully searchable and accessible online, the national library said.

The vast majority of the British Library's 750 million pages of newspapers — the largest collections in the world — are currently available only on microfilm or bound in bulky volumes. Thousands of researchers have to make a trip to an archive building just outside London to look through them.

Shame on the British for thinking technology has a place in the newspaper business.

If we undertook a similar project in this country, what value would it have? I can see the historical perspective, but, as someone who has spent a great deal of time looking through old newspapers, it really comes down to those rare moments when you find the "Farmer Brown's cow kicked over a lantern and burned down the whole town" stories, and those are few and far between. If they were digitally cataloged, how fun would it be to find one?

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