From CIO-Today.com... -ac
Chirac Plans French 'Counter-Offensive' on Internet Culture
French President Jacques Chirac has vowed to launch a new "counter-offensive" against American cultural domination, enlisting the support of the British, German and Spanish governments in a multimillion euro bid to put the whole of European literature online. The president was reacting last week to news that the American search-engine provider Google is to offer access to some 15 million books and documents currently housed in five of the most prestigious libraries in the English-speaking world.
The realization that the "Anglo-Saxons" were on the verge of a major breakthrough toward the dream of a universal library seriously rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising again the fear that French language and ideas will one day be reduced to a quaint regional peculiarity. So on Wednesday Chirac met with Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and National Library president Jean-Noel Jeanneney and asked them "to analyze the conditions under which the collections of the great libraries in France and Europe could be put more widely and more rapidly on the Internet."
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-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
