France wants in on cyber culture
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A 1977 Francois Truffaut interview and the original manuscript of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” are among items France has put online, aiding President Jacques Chirac’s goal to blunt the “Anglo-Saxon” dominance of the Web.
About 100,000 television and radio broadcasts were posted online recently by the state-owned French National Audiovisual Institute as it opened a digitized catalog. That’s in addition to the more than 80,000 books and newspapers clips put up this year on the French National Library portal called Gallica.
The two databases will soon be followed by Quaero, a European search engine created by France and Germany and aimed at taking on U.S. giants Google and Yahoo.
“We’re measuring what’s at stake, fighting everywhere to create a fundamental tool for cultural diversity,” Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the French National Library, wrote in Le Monde this week. “Let’s not leave the planet to Google.”
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