"If you could use Google to just look across digital libraries, into any digital library collection, now that would be cool," said Daniel Greenstein, university librarian of the California Digital Library, the digital branch of the University of California library system.

"It would help libraries achieve something that we haven't yet been able to achieve by ourselves," Dr. Greenstein said, "which is to place all of our publicly accessible digital library collections in a common pool." [...]

Reference librarians are trying to bring material from the deep Web to the surface. In recent months, dozens of research libraries began working with Google and other search engines to help put their collections within reach of a broader public.

Carnegie-Mellon University, for instance, has digitally scanned 1.6 million pages of archival material from the papers of Carnegie-Mellon scientists like Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner for economics and a computer chess expert. Now, a Google search for "Herbert Simon and Carnegie Mellon" turns up the Simon papers.

Google has also indexed two million book titles through the Online Computer Library Center, which manages a database of catalogs from 12,000 libraries around the world.

Other search sites are striking similar deals. Yahoo recently signed an agreement with the online library center to index its catalogs, and four months ago, it started carrying out a plan to make more of the deep Web reachable through Yahoo.