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Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT/The New York Times
Published: December 14, 2004
Google, the operator of the world's most popular
Internet search service, plans to announce an
agreement today with some of the nation's leading
research libraries and Oxford University 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.
Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last
summer - has agreed to underwrite the projects being
announced today while also adding its own technical
abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens
of thousands of pages a day at each library.
Although Google executives declined to comment on its
technology or the cost of the undertaking, others
involved estimate the figure at $10 for each of the
more than 15 million books and other documents covered
in the agreements. Librarians involved predict the
project could take at least a decade.
Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the
pacts are almost certain to touch off a race with
other major Internet search providers like Amazon,
Microsoft and Yahoo. Like Google, they might 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.
"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge
will be digitized and available, one hopes for free
reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading
in libraries today," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford
University's head librarian.
The Google effort and others like it that are already
under way, including projects by the Library of
Congress to put selections of its best holdings
online, are part of a trend to potentially democratize
access to information that has long been available to
only small, select groups of students and scholars.
Last night the Library of Congress and a group of
international libraries from the United States,
Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a
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.
"Having the great libraries at your fingertips allows
us to build on and create great works based on the
work of others," said Brewster Kahle, founder and
president of the Internet Archive, a San
Francisco-based digital library that is also trying to
digitize existing print information.
The agreements to be announced today will allow Google
to publish the full text of only those library books
old enough to no longer be under copyright. For
copyrighted works, Google would scan in the entire
text, but make only short excerpts available online.
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
Bodleian Library at Oxford 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.
The trend toward online libraries and virtual card
catalogs is one that already has book publishers
scrambling to respond.
At least a dozen major publishing companies, including
some of the country's biggest producers of nonfiction
books - the primary target for the online text-search
efforts - have already entered ventures with Google
and Amazon that allow users to search the text of
copyrighted books online and read excerpts.
Publishers including HarperCollins, the Penguin Group,
Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic have signed up for
both the Google and Amazon programs. The largest
American trade publisher, Random House, participates
in Amazon's program but is still negotiating with
Google, which calls its program Google Print.
The Amazon and Google programs work by restricting the
access of users to only a few pages of a copyrighted
book during each search, offering enough to help them
decide whether the book meets their requirements
enough to justify ordering the print version. Those
features restrict a user's ability to copy, cut or
print the copyrighted material, while limiting
on-screen reading to a few pages at a time. Books
still under copyright at the libraries involved in
Google's new project are likely to be protected by
similar restrictions.
- Forwarded by AlmeidaG(ji), www.goa-world.com
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