Posted on 02/25/2005 10:25:52 AM PST by sanchez810
It's bad enough that American films dominate European cinemas. Now Google is trying to do the same for Anglo-Saxon literature with a massive project to put millions of books from major libraries in the U.S. and Britain online. Libraries at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and the New York Public Library are onboard for the project and it has generated a great deal of excitement in academic circles. Well, some academic circles. A rallying cry has sprung up from -- of course -- France to once again fight the English onslaught.
Warning continental Europeans that the move will lead to a skewed vision of world culture for generations to come, Jean-Noel Jeanneny, Director of the National Library in Paris, vehemently critized the project in an article in the French daily Le Monde. With only English-language libraries included, the project could lead to "an overwhelming dominance" of Anglo-Saxon culture. Google's authority on the Web, will give improper weight to English-language books, he said. In other words, one fine day, school kids might believe that important books were written only in English.
Jeanneney is attempting to rally the European troops to fight the Google power. If Europeans don't do something soon about digitalising their libraries, it will be too late, he says. Many EU countries have, indeed, already started digitalizing their cultural heritage. In Germany, SPIEGEL ONLINE supports Project Gutenberg, a private digitalization project with more than 420,000 pages of text.
On a European level, the European Library will start up next month in a project to coordinate the digital collections of European national libraries online. It's a start, but nothing like the mammoth Google project, in which about 5,000 titles a day are scanned.
Of course, if an independent European project is unsuccessful, there's always the fall back plan. The office of the European Library in The Hague is in talks with, yes, Google. The goal: to get European libraries in on the Google digitalization project. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. (2:30 CET)
As long as the Europeans pay for digitizing the works in their languages, why not, the more the merrier!
Check out this Google search on French Military Victories.
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html
Let them eat Bablefish.
lol
This is all your fault nw_az.
You found too many answers to too many questions :))))
Silly French.
"Those French, ...they have a different word for everything"
-Steve Martin (I think)-
Horrors of horrors. Frog-lingo is threatened again with extinction.
Even before I got to this sentence that was my first thought - why not approach Google..........DUH.......
The world's literary heritage is being threatened by the easy availability of literature. Go figure.
Do you ever get the impression that the French are control freaks?
You'd think that the French would have figured out by now that the reason their language is losing popularity is that they insist on linguistic purity. A useful language, must be a versital language that changes with the times, and borrowers words from other languages. Otherwise, it dies.
Thought you'd like that.
Yeah They are, after all they Invented modern socialism.
"Oh my God, he spoke French, he's dead."
LOL... lets tell the french not to worry, they're really good at skewing themselves, generation after generation.
Sod off froggies!
Because Europeans would rather see American films than European films.
Yup this sounds about right.
When the government looses control over the language and the knowledge given to the "average" citizen, they loose control over those people.
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