Chirac to demand EU response to Google. French President to call for digitisation project to preserve cultural diversity, reports Mark Chillingworth.(Brief Article)

Jacques Chirac, the French President, is to propose a European-wide digitisation of European libraries to rival GooglePrint later this year.

In a statement from the Elysee Palace, Chirac announced that the French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and the president of the National Library of France, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, will study the viability of such a plan.

The French government is increasingly concerned that Google's "industrial scale" digitisation of leading Anglo-Saxon library book collections, announced last December, will lead to the internet being dominated by English language priorities and scholarly works.

Chirac described equivalent access to the collections of European national libraries as "fundamental for the dissemination of knowledge". Jeanneney is a well-known critic of Google, having penned articles against the GooglePrint initiative.