Google to Digitize 15 Million Books in 10 years

During the December 14, 2004 broadcast of ABC News World News Tonight, Peter Jennings reported that Google announced their goal to digitize 15 million Books in 10 years.

During the December 14, 2004 broadcast of ABC News World News Tonight, Peter Jennings reported that Google announced their goal to digitize 15 million Books in 10 years.This ABC news report featured a machine housed in the basement of the Stanford University Library that can digitize 1,000 pages each hour where the outcome produces pages of books that can be searched on. Ray Suarez of PBS Newshour heralds this as “the beginning of a virtual global library online.” Suarez, as did ABC News, reports that “the university libraries included in the initial project are: Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and Michigan. The database will also include books from the New York City Public Library. The amount of data available from each library will vary. Readers will be able to type phrases and words into the Google search engine, and then be linked to sections of text from library books.” Mark Colvin of ABC radio offers that this milestone is one for the history books and will be remembered as a “gigantic step towards the WWW being the biggest repository of knowledge the world has ever seen.” Gary Price, a news editor with the venerable SerachEngineWatch.com, also reports further on “this massive scanning project.” Google Library is destined to transform education, on-line reference, digital libraries, e-publishing, etc in ways that we cannot possibly begin to conceptualize. I always like to say that the root of Google is G-O-O, which also the root of Good. So, our ongoing discussion about why Google is Good continues to expand like the (on-line) information universe. Google Library holds great promise to further transcend the institution and library practices. The partnership between Google and academic and public libraries undoubtedly will further develop, enhance and shape the online library experience for future generations and re-conceptualize and transform the library itself.