The Washington Post today has an interview with Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, who now holds the title of "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google. In it, he talks about his efforts to digitize and make freely available the content of tens of thousands of the world's great volumes.

"Think for a moment about the dead-tree problem," he said. "When you stand in your own personal library looking for something and you realize that A, you can't remember which book it was in, and B, there's no way you can go through manually looking at all the pages, then you think, 'God, I wish all this stuff was online.' "

That's the stated goal of Google's library project, to create a massive electronic card catalog that will help people find information in published books, much as Google already does with Web pages.

(The Washington Post)