Google Inc. has contributed $3 million to a Library of Congress initiative to make print and multimedia works related to the culture of other nations available online.

Its contribution, which will primarily go toward planning the initiative known as the World Digital Library, is separate from Google's own program for scanning books held in several university and public libraries.

The Li

brary of Congress "project is aligned with our mission in general that bringing more books online and making them available and searchable is good," said Adam Smith, a Google senior business-product manager.

Under an earlier pilot initiative, the Library of Congress and Google have jointly scanned roughly 5,000 public-domain works, which Mr. Smith said will one day likely be accessible through the Google Book Search service.