France's efforts to digitize its culture, from Marcel Proust's manuscripts to the first films of the legendary Lumiere brothers, long have been bogged down by the country's reluctance to rely on help from American Internet giant Google Inc.

A new startup launched Thursday says it may be the answer.

The consortium of French technology companies and government-backed information-technology research labs says it can provide the know-how needed by Europe's libraries, universities, publishers and others to scan, catalog and deliver to end users the contents of their archives _ better than Google can.

The consortium's partners have studied the results of Google Books' scanning efforts, "and we know that we can do better," said Alain Pierrot, one of the project's leaders.

"We also know we have a ways to go, in productivity, in quality, in profitability. And we set up the consortium to do exactly that," Pierrot said at a news conference to present the project.

The all-French challenger calls itself "an alternative to Google," despite a yawning gulf between them in terms of size.

The French project goes by the name "Polinum," a French acronym that stands for "Operating Platform for Digital Books."

It is led by Jean-Pierre Gerault, the chief executive of a French company that makes optical scanning machines used to rapidly and automatically scan thousands of book pages an hour. He said it has attracted euro4 million ($5.7 million) in financing from the European Union and local authorities in France's Aquitaine region where it is based. It aims to have its technology operational in three years.

Google's Google Books project meanwhile has already scanned and catalogued more than 10 million books as of last month. France's version, the Gallica project run by the French national library, has less than a million items in its database, including books and other documents.

The consortium has a mere euro4 million ($5.7 million) in financing, collected from the European Union and local authorities in France's Aquitaine region. Its goal is to have its technology and service operational within three years.

Pierrot says the consortium can improve on Google's book scanning efforts with scanners that give better quality images, more advanced optical character recognition, and a more powerful search system to make finding valuable data in the mass of digitized content easier.