Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Google Is Not the End of History

...according to Le Monde.

From the Chronicle:

"President Jacques Chirac of France has asked the head of the country's national library and the minister of culture and communication to plan a French-led project that would make millions of European literary works accessible on the Internet.

"The move appears to be a response to a warning from Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the National Library of France, in an essay in the newspaper Le Monde in January. He said plans by Google and five leading academic institutions and libraries in the United States and Britain to digitize and make available online the content of millions of volumes posed a "risk of a crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations will have of the world" (The Chronicle, March 4).

"Mr. Jeanneney and Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the culture minister, met in March with Mr. Chirac, who told them to begin laying the groundwork for a European endeavor similar to the Google project."

Story at: http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i31/31a02901.htm

1 comment:

Woodson said...

I had a professor in graduate school who said that, given our response to Sputnik, she often wished that the Soviets had put a symphony orchestra on the moon. Who could have guessed that a gigantic American corporation would be the spark for a major humanities program in France? It's a funny, funny world, isn't it.