Capacities of the Google books collections in adding to the history of lifelong education in Russia

this paper explores the capacity of online Google Books and Ngram Viewer as a potential data source for studying the history of lifelong education/learning in Russia. It reveals the methods of data collection in Google Books digital databases, provides some examples of applying socio-linguistic methods to data analysis. The study shows that a number of unknown or barely known documents can be traced with the help of Google Books. The analysis of the displayed data adds to the intellectual history of the concept. The study shows that the first mention of lifelong education in Soviet publications dates back to 1967. The term was borrowed from the French language. The USSR contributed to the development of the international concept of lifelong education, in particular, to The Faure Report (1972). The adaption of the global concept in the socialist state had distinctive peculiarities compared to the capitalist countries. The adaption of the concept of lifelong education started a shift from the paradigm of vospitanie to the paradigm of education, from «developing» personality to educating a human. Soviet pedagogy adopted the idea of a comprehensively harmoniously developed personality/ person as the goal of lifelong education. The theory of lifelong education is interdisciplinary and includes the effort of psychology, sociology, Economics, scientific communism and pedagogy. The use of Google Books databases is associated with a large number of constraints; however, today, it is one of few complete collections of digitized word-by-word texts available from anywhere in the world.