Google, the operator of the world’s most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement on Tuesday with some of USA’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 body of material and create a digital card catalogue and searchable library for the world’s books, scholarly papers and special collections. Google has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced today, while also adding its own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitising 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 digitising their collections for their own institutional uses. ‘‘Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitised 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 are part of a trend to potentially democratise 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 US, 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. 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. —NYT
