NYT, pg1, lead: Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database

[DeepModem Mom]

Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database
By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT

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....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html?oref=login

[bobbieinok]

1. wow

[tuvor]

2. "Internet search providers like Amazon"???

I wonder how familiar the reporter is with the Internets.

[Must_B_Free]

3. I wonder how familiar the poster is with the Amazon...

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Amazon can search for text from a book

which is fairly relevant for this article. It doesn't cover all books (and I can't find out how many it does cover so far).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/103-1754664-3872640

[Khephra]

4. I haven't been able to reach Google for 3 days for some reason

Anyone else having trouble getting Google to load?

[Frozen Hamster]

5. This is great

I can't tell you how tedious it is searching through university libraries in search of relevant articles and essays. Google's new beta search site, http://scholar.google.com has great potential

[atommom]

6. Cool. This will be a great help, especially to people

who need to access older (no-longer-copyrighted) materials. The publishers of current periodicals will no doubt insist on charging all non-subscribers for access (as they do now). :eyes: But developments like this should put some pressure on the big journal publishers to revise some of their policies.