[With thanks to an item in Peter Suber’s Open Access News, the best source of anything to do with the fast-growing Open Access movement, I would like to pass on the following]
An excellent article on the expansion of the Google Print project appeared in TechnologyReview the other day. Called the Google Library Project, it is Google’s ambitious plan to manually scan and digitize millions of books in five of America’s largest libraries plus Oxford University’s Bodleian Library here in the UK (see the Bodleian on Google’s scanning). So, virtually any book that has been published will, one day, be full-text searchable on the web through Google.
The libraries have allowed Google’s own staff to ’set up shop’ on their premises and to install Google’s own top secret high speed book scanning equipment. The Google Library Project will take many years to complete, resulting in millions of books being full text searchable through Google. Effectively, Google is attempting to ‘backdate the internet’ to the beginning of written history! Initially, only books out of copyright and in the public domain are being digitized. Each library will be given a copy of the final results with no strings attached, except that they cannot allow use that hurts Google.
Originally referred to as ‘Project Ocean’, the New York Times somehow got wind of it way ahead of the formal announcement, mentioning it towards the end of a long article about ’search engine wars’ published back in February 2004.
This good introductory article appeared in Information Today soon after the project’s official announcement at the end of November 2004.