Google to Scan the World's Greatest Libraries

Back in the early days of Google, they told everyone who would listen that its mission was to make all the world's information searchable...and they weren't kidding.

This week, Google announced plans to digitize and make searchable, portions of the collections of five of the world's leading research libraries. Over the next few years Google will scan and index nearly all the 8 million books in Stanford's collection and the 7 million at the University of Michigan. It will do the same for portions of the New York Public Library and libraries at Harvard and Oxford.

The effort, the largest of its kind ever attempted, will create searchable database of some 50 million titles. Within six years we will be able to view online the full text of a vast assortment of titles in public domain and excerpts from those still under copyright. In each case text will be presented with full bibliographic information and pointers to libraries or online merchants where the books can be found.

It's a project of unparalleled scope, one all the more astonishing because Google is underwriting a large portion of it at a cost estimated to be $10 per title. Normally, it would take about 1,600 years to do this using traditional methods. Google will do it in six years. Google will provide the digitizing equipment. People will place the books and documents on sophisticated scanners whose high-resolution cameras capture an image of each page and convert it to a digital file.

The costs to do it using traditional methods would probably be around $1 billion, which is why it never would have been done without Google. To do it the old fashioned way would include the human cost of preparing the material for scanning, packing it up and sending it out to vendors and then quality-control checking of the results. It will be a lot less under Google's plan.

Nothing on this huge scale has ever been attempted before. In a few years, anyone with an Internet connection will have access to a vast research library. Now that is what the Internet is for!!