Google's plan to put millions of books from famous libraries online will break down the barriers to academia, writes Seán O'Driscoll in New York

The president of New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, is poring over figures at his desk. "Last year, we had more online visitors than physical visitors to the library itself. With Google's help, our online figures are going to be somewhere up here." He points to a spot on the table that is literally off the charts, a point somewhere way above any of the columns on the graph in front of him.

That massive rise in visitors is one that could signal a revolution in print information.

After a successful trial run, the New York Public Library, the most popular library in America after the Library of Congress, is just weeks away from announcing that it is to allow Google to scan its entire collection of public- domain books.

The University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and lately, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, have all agreed to provide massive collections to Google, which hopes to scan about 15 million volumes in the next 10 years.

As you read this, a Swiss-made machine in Stanford University is scanning 1,000 pages an hour of Stanford's eight-million-strong book collection, turning the pages itself and photographing each one of them for Google's vast digital collection.

The universities in Michigan and California have gone even further, allowing Google to scan all books that are still in copyright, provided the user can only see three or four sentences around a word-search.

Paul LeClerc has a passion for the global reach of the library project, churning over statistics while recalling his scholarly days in Europe, when he was thrown out of a library that houses an Academie Francaise collection because he was not wearing a tie.

With Google's digital scanning, he says, anyone in the world with access to a laptop computer will be able search millions of books in their own bed at two o'clock in the morning. The searches open up the possibility of hyper-linked books, allowing readers to jump from one reference to another, rummaging through thousands of books and opening whole new areas of research.

The uploading of millions of pages of historic documents will also break the distinction between academic and amateur boffin, much as the internet is breaking the boundaries between investigative journalists and amateur blogger. With millions of out-of-print books uploaded, it will also help reclassify the importance of forgotten works.Books, in essence, will no longer be self-contained.

"The line between amateur and expert is breaking down," says Brewster Kahle, the chairman of the Internet Archive, a rival project that is also scanning hundreds of thousands books.

Most importantly, Kahle believes, authorities in any given field will become much more accountable.

"Academics will no longer be in sole possession of source materials. People on the next level down will be emboldened to question authority and will be much more likely to dig up new answers."

But there are also some worrying developments that go along with Google's relentless drive for world knowledge. With Google having recently purchased the vast user-driven video site, Youtube, and with a growing control over internet search engines and even satellite images, are we handing over too much of our collective knowledge to one corporation? Should we, as critics have said, surrender Western knowledge to a business that this year agreed to block pro-democracy websites in China?

Do a Google Images search in Ireland for "Tiananmen Square" and you get photo after photo of victims of the 1989 student repression, as well as the iconic photograph of a protester in a white shirt standing in front of a tank column. Do the same search on Google.cn, Google's Chinese version and you get some creepy Stepford Wives-types photos of smiling people and flying birds, Tiananmen Square here presented simply as a popular tourist destination.

A text search for "Tibet Independence" is also directed away from much more popular Tibet Independence sites to a China Daily article criticising the Dalai Lama. Discussions of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and Chinese state oppression are also blocked - the first search result for Falun Gong is for an unsettling site that accuses the movement of treachery and corruption.

Tom Turvey, the head of the Google Book Search Partnerships, says that he is not responsible for Chinese policy but adds that there is no plan to censor books for the Chinese market. However, with the scanning project still under way, the Google Library has yet to be tested by the Chinese government.

Also, while Turvey says there is currently no advertising attached to the scanned books, he agrees that the issue has still not been resolved and that Google is still considering the maturity of individual markets. So will searches for the anti-fast food book Fast Food Nation come with an advertisement for McDonalds? Will books on Chinese state oppression come with adverts for the happy-worker paradise that is modern China?

That's hardly implausible, as Google has been selling key-word advertising on its search engine for years. The insurance giant Geico sued Google after discovering that word searches for the Geico name came with side adverts for rival insurance companies. The case was settled before it went to court and the legal issue has yet to be resolved. Turvey says he doesn't envision such a scenario for the library project, as searches for individual books could be set with advertisements that closely resemble the key-word searches for that book.

For Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive, Google is still too secretive and likely to fall back on "no comment" lines about the library project. "All the libraries that agree to hand over their books have to sign confidentiality agreements. Google are doing everything they can to stop people from finding out even where the books are being scanned," he said.

Paul LeClerc at New York Public Library confirmed that the library had to sign a confidentiality agreement and cannot even say if the books are being scanned at the library or offsite. For LeClerc, the confidential agreement is merely Google's way of protecting its idea from outside competition.

He does not, he says, fear that Google might hold a quasi-monopoly on large sections of American free thought or hold back pro-democracy books from scanning.

"The American cultural experience is so vast that I cannot imagine any one corporation managing to get control of it. There are so many alternative avenues. This is a free technology, and it's proved remarkably effective. Why not look at it positively?" he says.

As a recent front page International Herald Tribune article suggested this week, rapid expansion is deep in Google's corporate culture and the company is improvising its way through copyright and other legal problems, moving with the boldness of an oversized internet start-up company. For Google and its supporters, the company's China policy is an example of its missionary zeal to spread knowledge in a corrupt world rather than a scary attempt to control world thought.

If, as triple Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman has suggested, the world's knowledge barrier is flattening, then Google is probably hammering it into the ground faster than anyone else. This wresting of knowledge from Western academics and placing it in the hands of web-savvy teenagers around the world could have profound implications for the developing world.

By opening themselves up to hundreds of millions of new users, the libraries hope, in return, to gain prestige, at a time when many, including the New York Public Library, have found physical visits to the library are levelling off. With the University of California adding a massive collection to the Google Library in August, you have the emergence of a world library that rivals that of the Great Library of Alexandria, which hoped to house most of the known written texts in existence 300 BC.

"There is absolutely no doubt that this is a very exciting project," says Brewster Kahle. He points to a quote by Prof Peter Lyman of Berkeley College, who said that, with the digital library, knowledge finally has an address - people can verify supposed academic wisdom by instantly checking the sources of that wisdom.

"My only question is - does Google have an address?" says Kahle. "It now has massive power in its hands. I just hope it handles it well."