Google turns a new page in library project

IHT - NY Times: "Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, announced an agreement Tuesday with Oxford University and some of the leading U.S. research libraries to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web. It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties.

The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections. Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the agreements are almost certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Like Google, they may seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own institutional uses.

On Monday night, the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a new plan to create a publicly available digital archive of one million books on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by next April.

Each agreement with a library is slightly different. Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford's collection and the seven million at Michigan. The Harvard project will initially be limited to only about 40,000 volumes. The scanning at Oxford, at the Bodleian Library, will be limited to an unspecified number of books published before 1900, while the New York Public Library project will involve fragile material not under copyright that library officials said would be of interest primarily to scholars.

Google's two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have long vowed to make all of the world's information accessible to anyone with a Web browser. Tuesday's agreements will put them a few steps closer to that goal, at least in terms of the English-language portion of the world's information. "