Incredible news in the NY Times about Google becoming the world's largest digital library. Google is underwriting the digitization and provision of selected collections from research institutions including Oxford University, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library. The goal of the Google Print project is to "create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections." It is predicted that it would take a least a decade to digitize the more than 15 million books and documents and would cost about $10 to process each item. Full text should be available for items out of copyright and excerpts will be available for copyrighted works.

When you consider this news along with other forms of electronic access to book contents, e.g. Amazon's "Look Inside the Book" feature, and commercial ebook services such as netLibrary, the impact on information seeking is rather enormous. The utility of the Internet grows immensely as we begin to gain full text access to the mass of printed knowledge that has been available only in libraries up until recently.

Using information from a distance for learning has always been what attracts me equally to both the Internet and libraries. In grad school I was fascinated by the possibilities the Internet presented for art education. These days I'm just as amazed as a father at the number of resources we have at our disposal for helping my son find information about whatever he's interested in at the moment. Presently it's trains and games.

Looking back at how I learned as a child and observing how people learn today, I can see the incredible advantage to living in this networked world. But I also wonder about how much of people's learning is affected by what they find on the Internet versus in printed publications. Along with that wondering is a deep concern I have about information literacy and the ability of people to discern authority and authenticity in what they read.

Adding massive collections of text that are thought to be authoritative just by virtue of being printed and collected in reputable libraries and via established commercial publishing houses helps to mitigate my concerns about authority a great deal. Well, at least it may improve the odds that people will find authoritative information by adding these documents to the mix. But I still wonder how people learn to make decisions about what they find on the Internet. I wonder how Google will position this new corpus. Will they relegate it to a separate space, a la Google Scholar? Will it eventually find its way into their tabs so that people can shift from viewing the glut of results from the web to the results from the digitized printed matter? Who will be the guides to help people learn how to make sense of all the information they're going to be presented? Who are going to be the reference librarians of Google -- those skilled in research and reference materials that will help me find useful information in areas I'm not knowledgable about. Will schools teach children how to think about what they are finding, to discriminate what is useful and what is not?