Google plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford University’s collection and the seven million at the University of Michigan.

The goal is to create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world’s books, scholarly papers and special collections.

The Library of Congress and a group of international libraries also announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of one million books on the Internet, with 70,000 volumes online by next April.