A French Library Leader Urges a European Response

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Soon after Google announced its library project in December, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the National Library of France, issued a call to arms to European librarians, exhorting them to mount a large-scale digital library of their own. Failure to do so, he argued in newspaper editorials and public statements, would lead to American cultural hegemony in scholarship. His argument has led to action: In May, 23 national libraries in the European Union, including France's, announced their support for the European digital-library project.

Q. How does the Google project to put online the content of five large libraries -- four American and one British -- pose a threat to European heritage?

A. The Google project does not represent a direct threat to European heritage in itself. But leaving Google to be the sole master of a future and unique "virtual library," formed by the digitization of the works of the five prestigious institutions with which the project is partnered, could provoke a serious inequality in the representation of knowledge and of culture on the Web.

Q. Do you think there is a chance that European literature and historical items could be lost to future generations if they are not digitized?

A. Heritage institutions, in Europe as in America, are always preoccupied with the preservation of works, and will guarantee as much as possible that researchers have physical access to them. But if these riches don't find the representation that they deserve on the Web, when the hour arrives that a large part of intellectual activity is elaborated and draws its sources from the Net, then an immense majority of people using the Internet will not be able to lean on these riches. ... Worse still, future generations risk not even knowing of their existence, except by the faraway echo of the citations of authors, which will have been digitized and diffused. In this sense, yes, they would have been lost.

Q. Some people say that you are overreacting, and that plenty of European books will be scanned in the Google project already.

A. The appeal that I launched should not in any case be interpreted as a reaction aimed at countering the American enterprise's project. It's rather a question of an enthusiastic appeal to Europeans so that the stimulating shock of the announcement of the Google Print project invites us to contribute to this formidable design, which has been awaited for so long and is now made possible by the evolution of technology and the development of the Web. ... The distribution of access to works is an essential mission of libraries, and cannot be found in a delegation to a single operator whose goals are not those of public service, heritage, and research, but the search for profit, in a commercial enterprise that is, for all that, very honorable.

Q. How soon do you hope to have the EU digital-library project up and running, and how large do you expect it to get?

A. The European libraries have just demonstrated a remarkable fervor because in just a few weeks, 23 national-heritage libraries confirmed their participation in this great project. ... We will continue to rapidly advance toward organizing the operational phase in taking the best part of our respective experiences, which are already so strong in the realm of digitization.

This e-mail interview was conducted and translated by Aisha Labi.