In a quiet room in a quiet library in a quiet Belgian town, six librarians and a ubiquitous US multinational are working to – as they see it – liberate centuries of European culture from dusty shelves.
A team at the University of Ghent library spends its days transferring books from the building's 24 floors to trolleys bearing the colourful Google logo.
Vans take away about 1,000 books a week to an undisclosed location – “for security reasons”, Google says – where they are pro-cessed, scanned, catalogued, electronically archived and then returned to Ghent a month later. But only about a quarter of Ghent's million-plus books will make the transition to the electronic realm: only those published before 1869 are eligible for scanning.
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