The NSF Digital Libraries Initiative: The Origins of Google

In 1994 the National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative made its first six awards. One of the six initial awards, funded on September 1, 1994, was for The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, in which Larry Page and Sergey Brin participated.

"This project . . . is to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal library, proving uniform access to the large number of emerging networked information sources and collections. These include both on-line versions of pre-existing works and new works and media of all kinds that will be available on the globally interlinked computer networks of the future. The Integrated Digital Library is broadly defined to include everything from personal information collections, to the collections that one finds today in conventional libraries, to the large data collections shared by scientists. The technology developed in this project will provide the "glue" that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion."