Category Archives: library_of_congress

world digital library

library of congress.jpg The Library of Congress has announced plans for the creation of a World Digital Library, “a shared global undertaking” that will make a major chunk of its collection freely available online, along with contributions from other national libraries around the world. From The Washington Post:

…[the] goal is to bring together materials from the United States and Europe with precious items from Islamic nations stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Africa, as well as important materials from collections in East and South Asia.

Google has stepped forward as the first corporate donor, pledging $3 million to help get operations underway. At this point, there doesn’t appear to be any direct connection to Google’s Book Search program, though Google has been working with LOC to test and refine its book-scanning technology.

google and big brother

Can Google remain true to its promise to “do no evil,” now that it has shareholders to worry about, advertisers to please, and an ever-increasing reach into the repositories of human knowledge? Google still gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling. It’s got the goofy name, those cute seasonal tailorings of its masthead, the lava lamps. And this is not to mention the various amusing pastimes – the “Google Whack” game in which you try to find two words that cohabit only one of the search engine’s eight billion web pages; or every writer’s guilty pleasure, the Googling of the self, the “auto-Google,” that delicious act of cyber-onanism.
But where might it lead? One day, when I open my fridge, might a sensor not read my searching eye and know that I am looking for milk? And knowing that I have run out, suggest an array of retailers who might be able to replenish my supply? Could Google come to mediate every exchange of information, no matter how inane, or how carnal?
Or could it come to resemble something like the Central Intelligence Corporation in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash – a cross between the CIA, the Library of Congress, and DARPA’s “Total Information Awareness” program?
MercuryNews.com | 12/14/2004 | Does Google move augur commercialization of libraries?