A recent article called “France Launches Digital Library”  by Helana Spongenberg of BusinessWeek.com discusses Europeana, a digital library that France is introducing as its supplement to the European Digital Library. What struck me in reading this article was that the creation of Europeana was described as a substitute for US search engines.  The article discusses how major search engines, including those of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, have all announced plans to digitize large collections of books and other documents , and how France wants to help European countries preserve and reinforce all of its unique cultures by preventing European information from being completely ”Americanized”.  According to the article, France’s new cyberlibrary is scheduled to exceed 6 million books, movies, and other digital content by 2010. (Spongenberg, 1)

            I thought this article was very relevant to our class discussions on how new web searching methodes need to be introduced to accomodate the rapid growth of cyberspace. An important point that this article makes is that although major search engines like Google and Yahoo have the capability to index nearly everything, it may not be in everyone’s best interest if it does so, even if doing so would make information retrieval more convenient. Perhaps the widespread availability of some knowledge should not be limited to the American search engines, as it would make the cyber world one-dimensional and, to a degree, uninsteresting.  By making large public collections of documents available, countries like France are ensuring that American search engines don’t homogenize the web by consuming everything.  At the very least, they are offering Europeans an attractive reprieve from search engine giants.