libraries

The University of California (UC) system could take part in Google's book-scanning project, and would make 34 million volumes available to the search engine.

Details, details-such is the Achilles' Hell of the visionary temperament. When Google put forth a massive online literary digitization effort, the scholar, the literati, the purist self-educator, the mousey, bucked-toothed, four-eyed little girl in all of us cheered the soon-to-be nearer reach of all those words. But visions, especially the grandiose, face the speed bumps, the hurdles, of real world logic-or worse, lawyers.

As you have no doubt heard by now, five major libraries have agreed to let Google digitize all or part of their collections.

The Libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library Join with Google to Digitally Scan Library Books and Make Them Searchable Online.