“The collection housed at the extraordinary Mann Library will be digitized, making it possible for people everywhere to search and discover books on environmental science, public policy, natural resources, and much more,” announced William Rucklidge, a Google software engineer and Cornell man.

“This is tremendous news, and I hope people around the world will gain as much joy and enrichment from Cornell’s libraries as I did,” Rucklidge continued on the Inside Google Book Search Blog.

I’ll admit that I might gain more joy from another source – according to a release, Mann Library deals in “biological sciences, natural resources, plant, animal and environmental sciences, applied economics, management and public policy, human development, textiles and apparel, nutrition and food science,” while I’m more of a novel and short story sort of fellow – but it’s a nice thought.

Google’s also keeping mindful of lawyers – as with other Library Project developments, none of this will violate copyright law.  Only out-of-copyright texts will be made fully available, and for everything else (out of the 500,000 books that might be scanned), would-be readers “will just get the basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), [and] at most a few lines of text related to their search and information about where they can buy or borrow a book.”

Cornell University has joined signed on to be a part of Microsoft’s Live Book Search project, according to a blog entry posted by the team at Live Search and a press release issued by the school on Monday.

Danielle Tiedt, general manager of the Live Search Selection Team at Microsoft Corp. comments on the announcement in the press release, “Our alliance with Cornell University underscores the importance and value of Live Book Search to provide free access to out-of-copyright content to everyone with access to the Internet.”

“Participation by Cornell University in Live Book Search will help us to achieve our goal of transforming Web search into information search through the creation of the world’s most trusted index of authoritative content. This will enable customers to have the best possible experience finding answers to their questions, accomplishing their tasks, and discovering new information.”

CEO and founder of Kirtas, Lotfi Belkhir adds in the media statement, “This is a best-of-breed partnership. We’re very proud to contribute our technology and know-how in digitization to this unique and world-changing initiative.”

With the launch Windows Vista looming on the horizon, Microsoft appears to be working overtime to hype Live Search in the company’s ongoing effort to challenge Google for search supremacy.

It remains to be seen how many other academic institutions will join up with the Live Book Search initative.

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The work, published in the new issue of the journal Nature, shows much promise in the robotic field. Scientists foresee robots with the ability to build others robots, even more complex robots, the ability to repair themselves or others, particularly on missions where humans aren’t available, like deep space for example. A robot like this might be insanely useful to NASA right now as they try and figure out way to get their robot out of the dirt.

“Consider a robotic mission to a remote planet,” Lipson said. “If a traditional robot is sent and it breaks, the mission is over. But if modular robots are sent over with a supply of materials, and a fault happens, they may be able to self-repair.”

Much work is going in robotics right now and even the direction with which to send robotic development. The amorphous vs. evolutionary approaches are one area of contention right now. Amorphous or swarm uses specialized, one-function types similar to a hive and is currently being researched by NASA. The biological approach called evolutionary robotics is Lipson’s area of interest and he thinks this will be the future. This area allows robots to interact with their environments and react appropriately, learning, adapting, etc.

It makes one wonder about the future of robots and where it’s going and what it means to philosophical debates today. When Asimov wrote I, Robot, could he have envisioned where things were going? He would seem fortuitous. Is the robotic future somewhat grim, like say the Terminator, where robots will eventually take over, hunt us down and try to eliminate humans or is it something a bit more optimistic like Data from Star Trek? He did have positronic brain. In either case, robots, like computers are only as good as there programming. One can only hope that the programmers put a little binary code in their ever-broadening scope of commands and abilities that merely says right or wrong.

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.