But while the future may be digital, the National Library of Australia is working hard to ensure that the past is not forgotten, either.

The recently launched Australian Newspapers website, though still in beta form, already offers access to about 1 million articles, or 90,000 pages of news.

The archive will range from 1803, when the first Australian newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, was published, through to 1954.

According to project co-ordinator Cathy Pilgrim, the library hopes to have about 200,000 pages, or at least one page for every day in that date range, by some point in 2009, when the full service will be launched.

Ms Pilgrim said the project would give people unprecedented access to newspapers - and a window on Australia's past.

"Previously people would have to scroll through microfilm to find what they were looking for but now they can search by keywords and hopefully find what they are looking for," she said.

Ms Pilgrim said about 1.3 million pages had been scanned from microfilm to date, but that optical character recognition work - the process which allowed the pages to be searchable - had slowed the pace of the project.

"With historical newspapers the digital images have been created from microfilm , then the image is OCR-ed, so it's not always 100 per cent accurate," she said.

And it's the imperfection of optical character recognition that has led to the work going online ahead of time - the library is calling for volunteers.

"We put it out there and started sharing it with people because we wanted to engage with the community," Ms Pilgrim said.

"We want feedback from the user community. People can add tags and comments, and correct the OCR stuff, too."

Though a separate project from the library's Australian Newspaper Plan, which is seeking print copies of every Australian newspaper, the two dovetail nicely.

Both recognise the importance of newspaper in recording a nation's history.

The online service is aiming to 3.6 million pages online by the end of 2010.

Each state and territory is represented in the project, with the following newspaper chosen:

ACT - The Canberra Times

Victoria - The Argus

News South Wales - The Sydney Gazette and the Sydney Morning Herald

Queensland - The Courier Mail

Tasmania - The Hobart Mercury and the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen's Land Advertiser

South Australia - The Advertiser

Western Australia - The Perth Gazette, which became the West Australian

Northern Territory - The Northern Territory Times

The beta website can be found at http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del /home