Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database: "[G]oogle, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web"
But the strengths of the defenders are not to be underestimated. Remember that in the universities, many texts are still copied by hand as they have been during a thousand years, as if Gutenberg never lived on this planet. The professor writes on the blackboard - the students copy it into their notes. And even though reaserchers make their working papers freely available on the internet, those papers are taken away as soon as they are published into a journal, most of which charge a quite substantial fee for each downloaded item. Are we soon to see the day when institutional and informational barriers inside the universities are making them too much out of touch with the outside world to produce meaningful ideas about it?
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