Image: Flickr/Beatrice Murch
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Brewster with a printing press in 1992. Image: Flickr/Carl Malamud
Brewster Kahle: I think we’re seeing a broad experimentation. Wikipedia is a public donation model; the Internet Archive is a mix of offering services and keeping the spending very low, and creative approaches to that form of sustainability. The Public Library of Science is paid when people submit their articles. I don’t know what the answer is in terms of all the funding models: There are different ideas being tried, but this non-profit structure fits well for the internet.
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Deep-sea anglers, from a page in a book in Kahle's openlibrary.org
Those are all volunteers, Tumblrs in residence. What would you do with all of this material? They make something interesting, odd, fun, arty, whatever they want to do with it.The Internet Archive now has a TV news archive, which is great because a lot of video is blocked by GEMA in Germany (GEMA is a music rights organization in Germany which blocks many music videos on Youtube). When did it actually begin?
We started collecting in 2000. We had a version that was running in the past year, and completely re-did it and re-launched it. You can quote the videos in very specific ways, and there is a whole tool for narrowing in on what you want to quote. If you want to borrow the whole program, we put it on a DVD and lend it to the user, as a library model.
Open Library is an open, editable online book catalogue. One could see it as an e-book library. What challenges remain for the e-book format? Do you find that writers are open to the idea of digital lending?Most libraries are locked up.That doesn’t work well on the internet.
Most people just see it as the continuation of what a library is. It’s basically access to the long tail. That’s the big thing about the library—making access to the works of the 20th century, which are only basically available in print.
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Most of them are locked up. That doesn’t work well on the internet. We have the ones that are subscription-oriented, or tied to a particular vendor like Amazon, or they’re only available if you’re in a prestigious university. We have an opportunity for everyone to learn, so let’s take advantage of that.
The Wayback Machine's earliest archived version of itself, from November 30, 2001
I don’t know how—the news sites are struggling. We want to see publishing work and libraries work in the next generation. Libraries buy things and lend them, which makes sense in the digital age.A lot of the stuff you’re not buying.
Like webpages, they weren’t for sale in the first place. But the books are donated or we buy them. We have over one million physical books in Richmond, California. They’re not very accessible; you can’t get in the stacks. It’s a good place to go in and get a tour, but it’s not good for getting particular books out. It’s meant to be the preservation facility.The Internet Archive hit 404 billion pages, which is a bit of a joke. How did you celebrate?
People were betting what day we would hit 404 billion. Yes, we had a party!