The internet’s librarian, The Economist, March 5, 2009.
For a man who has set himself a seemingly impossible mission, Brewster Kahle seems remarkably laid back. Relaxing in the black leather recliner that serves as his office chair, his stockinged feet wriggling with evident enthusiasm, the founder of the Internet Archive explains what has driven him for more than a decade. “We are trying to build Alexandria 2.0,â€? says Mr Kahle with a wide-eyed, boyish grin. …
Mr Kahle is an unostentatious millionaire who does not “wear his money on clothesâ€?, as one acquaintance graciously puts it. But behind his dishevelled demeanour is a skilled technologist, an ardent activist and a successful serial entrepreneur. Having founded and sold technology companies to AOL and Amazon, he has now devoted himself to building a non-profit digital archive of free materials—books, films, concerts and so on—to rival the legendary Alexandrian library of antiquity. …
He founded the non-profit Internet Archive and, with a former colleague, co-founded a firm called Alexa that tracks and analyses the paths people follow as they move around the web, in order to direct people with similar interests to relevant information. Amazon bought Alexa for an estimated $250m in 1999. Mr Kahle continued to work on Alexa until 2002, but then dedicated himself fully to the Internet Archive.
The most famous part of the archive is the Wayback Machine (its name inspired by the WABAC machine in the 50-year-old television cartoon featuring Rocky and Bullwinkle). This online attic of digital memorabilia stores copies of internet sites so that people can see, for example, what economist.com looked like in January 1997. …
In addition to this archive of web pages there is also an audio library with more than 300,000 MP3 files, a moving-images archive with more than 150,000 films and videos, and a live-music archive with recordings of more than 60,000 concerts. All the collections are available free to anyone with internet access, each gathering its own set of fans. …
But all these things are steps towards Mr Kahle’s wider goal: to build the world’s largest digital library. He has recruited 135 libraries worldwide to openlibrary.org, the aim of which is to create a catalogue of every book ever published, with links to its full text where available. To that end, the Internet Archive is also digitising books on a large scale on behalf of its library partners. It scans more than 1,000 books every day, for which the libraries pay about $30 each. (The digital copy can then be made available by both parties.) …
Mr Kahle is taking a very long-term view. Universal online access to all knowledge may not be “a goal that is going to be finished in our lifetime,� says Mr Kahle. “But if you pick a goal far enough out, people can align to it. I am not interested in building an empire. Our idea is to build the future.�
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