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Google to Start Indexing Major
Libraries
Google, flush with 1.7 billion dollars from their IPO, is
undertaking an ambitious project to index all books within major
libraries:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1741231,00.asp
Scanning the libraries' collections will take years, but Google
already has made a small percentage available from its search
engine, said Susan Wojcicki, Google's director of product
management.
Google has reached different arrangements with the libraries,
each of which has a collection ranging from 7 million to 15 million
books. It will scan the entire collections of the Stanford and
Michigan libraries, while it will digitize works from 1900 and
earlier at Oxford, Wojcicki said.
Harvard and the New York Public Library are starting with pilot
projects of a subset of their collections.
"This is something we wanted to do when the company started, and it
was the vision of founders before they even started Google,"
Wojcicki said, noting Google's origin as a library digitization
project at Stanford. "This happened to be a time where Google had
enough resources to take on such an endeavor."
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