Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database

The NYT have picked up the story that Google are engaged in a venture with some of the major academic libraries in the world to digitise their holdings and make them 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."

I should think Larry Lessig, James Boyle, Brewster Kahle, John Naughton and many like-minded contemporaries will be pleased. I think it is a great initiative but it's just a start.