contador web Skip to content

France admits partnership with Google in its own digital library

France admits partnership with Google in its own digital library

France has been one of the most active European countries in criticizing Google’s projects. Since the American company announced plans to create the largest digital library in the world, with Google Books, that France, through its top managers, has insisted on the idea of ​​Europe fighting back against the project.

The main concern shown by those responsible has been to ensure that alternative languages ​​to English also guarantee a prominent place on the Internet, especially the countries’ historical and cultural heritage and that the Google project does not create a kind of Anglo-Saxon hegemony.

Together, Europe has sought to respond to this challenge through the European Digital Library, Europeana, but France has just presented a report with details on a unilateral project that it also intends to develop with the same objective of ensuring the representation of its language on the Internet and Google may become a partner in the initiative.

The French minister of culture admitted that Google could be the vehicle to boost the presence of the French estate on the Internet, through a project called Gallic, which for now has restricted access to professionals.

Gallic, coordinated by the French National Library, has spent much of the effort to digitize books and other documents that France has been carrying out and which, according to previously revealed data, has already deserved an investment of 750 million euros.

Globally, this project has close to one million digitized documents, but as part of a public-private partnership, the Government intends to make it a competitor of Google Books, which currently gathers around 10 million digitized books.

Gallic will be the basis of a new portal from which the candidate for Google Books competitor will be born, based on a model idealized in a study financed by the Government and presented yesterday.

Negotiations with Google and other players may arise in order to share costs in the costly task of digitizing books, in order to increase the available assets, but according to the French minister of culture, only if the American company accepts «to play for French rules, «he said at a press conference.

An agreement with Google could also be aimed at exchanging digitized books by Google – mostly at American universities – for books and documents in French, already digitized under the Gallic project.

French authors targeted by the digitizations will have the power to decide on the portion of the book that is available online. If the user wants to have access to the rest, he is referred to an online store, explains the person responsible for the study cited by the Associated Press. Commercial exploitation of this Digital Library will be ensured by advertising.

In an interview with Le Monde, the French minister of culture also criticized the conditions under which many European companies or entities agreed to do business with Google, especially with regard to the exclusivity of the announced agreements.

Frederic Mitterrand, who plans to visit Google’s offices in the United States soon, also assured that France will always negotiate with the American company on an open and non-exclusive basis for access to content.