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This is an interesting development:

By the end of the decade, anyone around the world will have instant access to 7 million volumes of information at the University of Michigan's libraries without ever setting foot in Ann Arbor, foraging through a maze of dimly lit shelves or opening a single book.

Google, the popular Internet search engine co-founded by U-M alumnus Larry Page, today plans to announce a deal making virtually everything in the university's extensive collections searchable online.

It's a task that U-M had already begun on its own but, at the current rate, would have taken an inordinate amount of money and about 1,600 years to complete. Now, Google will send in a team of employees to scan books with "non-destructive" technology it developed and expects to be finished in fewer than six years.

Neither U-M nor Google will pay money to the other, and the school gets a digital copy of everything it owns.

"This is the day the world changes," said John Wilkin, a University of Michigan librarian working with Google. "It will be disruptive because some people will worry that this is the beginning of the end of libraries. But this is something we have to do to revitalize the profession and make it more meaningful."

The project, which also includes the New York Public Library and libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities, will let Google users see the entire text of works in the public domain and those that the publisher has agreed to show online.