CHE on France/Google

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Chronicle of Higher Education online.

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France Plans to Digitize Its 'Cultural Patrimony' and Defy Google's 
'Domination'
By AISHA LABI

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-Nol Jeanneney,
president of the National Library of France. In an essay in the newspaper
Le Monde in January, he said that 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
last week with Mr. Chirac, who told them to begin laying the groundwork
for a European endeavor similar to the Google project.

In a statement released by his office, Mr. Chirac said that he had asked
Mr. Jeanneney and Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres to "analyze the conditions in
which the wealth of the great libraries of France and Europe could be made
more widely and quickly accessible on the Internet." Mr. Chirac said that
because of their "exceptionally rich cultural patrimony, France and Europe
must take a determining role" in such a project.

In an essay, "Google Is Not the End of History," that ran in Le Monde the
day after his meeting with President Chirac, Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres
described as "a clap of thunder in the numeric sky" the December
announcement "that a powerful, efficient, and popular American search
engine was going to digitize and put online 15 million books from the
patrimony conserved by some of the most prestigious Anglo-Saxon
libraries."

"The event comes in an intellectual and cultural climate in which the
digitization of documents and works seems to be the key to all problems,"  
Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres went on. He stressed that facilitating online
access to such resources is one of his priorities as minister and cited
existing projects to digitize artwork in French museums and 19th-century
magazines and newspapers in the national library.

"We probably have a lot to learn from Google, whose success comes largely
from the simplicity and ease of access it offers," Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres
acknowledged.

Yet French officials insist that their project should be seen not merely
as a reaction to Google, but in the context of existing French and
European efforts to make information available online.

[SNIP]

Mr. Jeanneney and Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres are expected to present a
preliminary proposal as early as May 2, when Paris will play host to a
European cultural summit, with representatives from the 25 European Union
countries. "This subject is one of the key issues in this meeting," the
ministry official said, "and there will be some announcement at that
point."

copyright 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education

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