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French National Library President Criticizes Google Project

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on February 22, 2005 - 4:37am.
Paris -- Jean-Christmas Jeanneney, president of the National Library of France (BNF), has written an article in French news daily Le Monde criticizing the Google Print project. Search engine giant Google has teamed up with some of the world's most prestigious libraries (Oxford University, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and New York's Public Library) in a plan that would put their entire collections online. Although Jeanneney acknowledged that the "Messianic" project would make thousands of important works available to "poor countries" and "underprivileged populations", he lamented the fact that the vast majority of documents would be digitized in English. Jeanneney called on the EU to provide a "generous budget" in order to launch a similar project with European libraries and prevent the "crushing domination of America".
tags: French | President | National Library | Google Project |