French Unhappy With Google Library Project
The National Library of France isn’t happy with Google’s current efforts to scan the collections of major American libraries, worried that their results will bear an overly American and English bias. To prove how unhappy he is, President Jean-Noël Jeanneney wrote an editorial. Reading the translated version, he warns against the “crushing domination of America” defining history for the future.
Oh my god! Why don’t people ever shutup! Google is an American company, dealing with a primarily English search engine, trying to add English content to its search engine. No one at Google is saying “We don’t want French books”; they just happen to not want French books. In fact, Google even hinted that it might scan those books at a later date, but is first concentrating on books that actually complement its mostly English search engine. Jeez, of all the “controversies”, this one is the most useless.
That is a terrible rant, but I am just sick of someone actually trying to politicize a search engine. If anyone wants Google to make France a big priority, they can go ahead and create their own search engine on par with Google, or scan their own books and submit them themselves.
However his words may appear, Jeanneney insists that his remarks were not intended to be anti-American, and went out of his way to commend the short-term effects of Google’s work as a “Messianic dream” that would “profit” under-privileged populations.Google said it was surprised by Jeanneney’s remarks. “For our perspective he (Jeanneney) had concern about Google Print because we partnered with Anglo Saxons. This is a first step for us; we can’t do everything at once,” a Google spokesperson told BetaNews.
“It is our intention to be as inclusive as possible, respect the diversity of cultures and we will work with any library and are interested in talking to institutions with great works like BNF (Bibliotheque nationale de France),” the spokesperson added. “However, we cannot guarantee that it will spread to France.”
One question: How would this “‘profit’ under-privileged populations”? Do jungle villagers normally speak English or French? Do they take breaks from hunting for food for their families to surf the net and Google ancient library works? What planet does this happen on?
(via Slashdot)
While I don’t fully agree with Mr. Jeanneney, I share some of his concerns. Sometimes our friends across the atlantic happen to forget that there is valuable research done in languages other than their own. While English is the international language of science, much is published in “foreign languages” and we shouldn’t ignore those titles.
I hope that Google will be commercially successful with this particular project. From what I hear their scanning leaves those books totally intact, while scanning at great speed. This is an absolute dream for every librarian. Make content accessible without destroying the content first.
So I send out a challenge to Mr. Jeanneney - get the French government to put up the money for that indexing to be done. Google ain’t going to say no, if someone is waving a big, fat check in front of them. So get some money and make those books accessible to everyone. What a fabulous project that would be.
Possibly other countries would follow - there are thousands of archives world wide and if the content there would all the sudden be searchable, it would revive this information, making it useful beyond gathering dust on a shelf in some archive in some corner of a hard to reach country.
Comment by CW | February 23, 2005
CW - I totally agree with you. Google, despite its vast revenues, is still a relatively small company. Despite doing billions of searches, it cannot send its 2,000 software engineers to operate book scanning machines, nor does it have the financial reasons to scan books all over the world. If countries want to look at this as more of a historical project than a search engine project, they can do the same thing they do for other historical projects: fund them themselves.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | February 23, 2005
Why don’t the French stop piss-moaning and either get their own search engine, or scan their books and send the scans to Google. Sometimes our French friends act like baby birds, sitting in their nest, waiting for someone to drop a worm in their open mouth. As they say in Paris, “Sacre bleu!”
P.S. Why do they still speak French in Paris, and not German or Russian?
Comment by BrooklynJon | February 23, 2005
Shut up, Frenchie.
Comment by Stu | February 25, 2005
P.S. Why do they still speak French in Paris, and not German or Russian?
.
Because we keep bailing them out?
*ducks*
Comment by Matt | February 26, 2005
[…] oogle Library Project
A few weeks after the head of the French national library complained about it, French President […]
Pingback by » French To Provide Alternative To Google Library Project InsideGoogle - part of the Blog News Channel | March 17, 2005