Guiding the Googlers: how will the search engine giant's big deal affect K-12 students?(Editorial)

The library community has been discussing, planning, lamenting and, yes, obsessing over this moment for years. In case you haven't heard, Google, flush with more than $1 billion after a stratospheric initial public offering, has forged agreements with some of the world's leading research libraries to digitize most of their content. The project could take as long as a decade and cost upwards of $150 million.

The romantic notion of the virtual library--or what I prefer to call the "transportable library," a veritable Library of Congress that's easy to reach from one's handheld device--is now upon us. It's not that digital libraries are anything new: several …