As an extension of its digitization project begun in 2006 with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google announced yesterday that a number of publishers will give Google access to their historical newspaper content. Notably, ProQuest will give Google access to content from among the 10,000+ newspaper titles in its vault. The microfilms will be scanned so users can see newspapers exactly as printed, and OCR software will extract the full text to make it searchable via the Google News Archive. According to Google’s Adam Smith, the new data will be ad-supported with no initial pay-per-view restrictions–unlike some existing News Archive content. ProQuest was careful to point out that its subscription services such as Historical Newspapers [available through MLC] will not be affected.

Additional information:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10035172-93.html
http://www.proquest.com/pressroom/pressrelease/08/20080908.shtml
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/bringing-history-online-one-newspaper.html