Seeing this microfiche image capture made me curious. Why are the historical archives of these old papers not online in fully indexed, easily searchable form? E

Seeing this microfiche image capture made me curious. Why are the historical archives of these old papers not online in fully indexed, easily searchable form? Even a pay-for service (excepting the public domain stuff) I could accept, but I see that apparently ProQuest has the rights to provide that service, and it's behind a paywall that's not even possible to directly subscribe to without going through their sales team--presumably it's for institutional use only. Depressing how much of the world's content is locked away from the Internet while we drown in cat videos and clickbait "news" sites.