The following Plus Edition article is written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.
What does a library look like anymore?
When Egyptian King Ptolemy I built the Library of Alexandria nearly 2,300 years ago, the great library became the intellectual center of the ancient world. Ptolemy hoped to gather as much human knowledge as possible. Even ships anchored in the port were impounded until all the manuscripts they contained could be copied. World leaders lent their scrolls for duplication, and library officials traveled far and wide to purchase entire collections. Meanwhile, dutiful scribes hand-copied the library’s awesome collection, which eventually grew to as many as 700,000 scrolls.
NOTE: Books with bindings and covers had not yet been invented. 2,300 years ago, “books” were available only as long scrolls of parchment.
Brewster Kahle is a modern-day Ptolemy: he wants to ensure universal access to all human knowledge. And now he thinks that goal is within our grasp. In fact, his web site, called The Internet Archive, has already stored billions of web pages. Yes, that’s BILLIONS of web pages. However, this online archive has a lot more than just web pages. It serves as an online library, the largest such library in the world. It also has 20 million books and texts, 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts), 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs), 3 million images and 200,000 software programs, all available at no charge to you. In fact, this online library gets more visitors in a year than most other libraries do in a lifetime.
Kahle is no stranger to the Internet. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. He studied artificial intelligence with Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis. In 1983, he helped start Thinking Machines, serving six years as a lead engineer for the parallel supercomputer maker. In the late 1980s, he pioneered the Internet’s first publishing system, known as WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), which was sold to AOL in 1995. He then co-founded Alexa Internet, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.
The Internet Archive is Kahle’s most ambitious project. He founded it in 1996 as a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California. It started as a few servers running in Kahle’s attic. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Today the Internet Archive includes texts (including complete books), audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in its collections. It also provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.
The Internet Archive now includes several divisions: The Wayback Machine, Open Library, Audio Archive, and more. The web site proudly proclaims, “Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Web pages are normally found at http://www.archive.org while books and many other materials are found athttp://www.OpenLibrary.org. Both of those addresses link to different parts of the Internet Archive.
Brewster Kahle latest organization is working on digitizing and storing the entire World Wide Web and making what has been digitized so far freely accessible at http://www.archive.org. If a bit of genealogy information was published on the web in the past but has since disappeared, there is an excellent chance that you can find an old copy of the information on Archive.org. Six hundred thousand people use the Internet Archive every day, conducting two thousand searches a second.
The Internet Archive is physically located at 500 Funston Avenue in San Francisco. It looks like a Greek Revival temple. There is a good reason for the similarity: it was built in 1923 by the Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist, and remained a church until Brewster Kahle bought the building. He wanted to move the Internet Archive out of his attic and into a much larger facility that could hold rows and rows of servers and disk arrays containing petabytes of data.
Brewster Kahle also is working on making all the stored material available in many different places. The information is available on desktop computers, laptops, tablets, eBook readers, cell phones, and most anyplace else there is a demand. Many libraries around the world also have “print on demand” printers that will download a book from The Internet Archive/Open Library, print it, bind it, and make it available to a patron whenever requested. These books are actual digital images of the original books.
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