Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle in 2009
Born	October 22, 1960 (1960-10-22) New York City, New York
Residence	San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS)
Occupation	Digital librarian Computer engineer Internet entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder of Alexa Internet Founder of Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle (/ˈkeɪl/ kayl; born 1960) is a computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian.

Biography

Kahle graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The emphasis of his studies was artificial intelligence; he studied under Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis.

Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations committed to making a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Kahle is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive. He is a member of the advisory board of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the Library of Congress, and is a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure. In 2010 he was given an honorary doctorate in computer science from Simmons College, where he studied library science in the 1980s.

He was a member of the Thinking Machines team (1983–1992), where he developed the WAIS system, a precursor to the World Wide Web. In 1992, he co-founded, with Bruce Gilliat, WAIS, Inc. (sold to AOL in 1995 for $15 million), and, in 1996, Alexa Internet (sold to Amazon.com in 1999 for $250M of stock). At the same time as he started Alexa, he founded the Internet Archive, which he continues to direct.

Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, created the Kahle/Austin Foundation, a US$45 million trust that supports the Internet Archive and other non-profit organizations. The Foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for the GNU project.

In his TED Talks Kahle describes his vision of a free digital library, which contains all the world's books, music, concerts, Television programs, and snapshots of World Wide Web pages using an invention called the Wayback Machine. He was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices of Alta Vista, and was struck by the enormity of the task being undertaken and achieved: to store and index everything that was on the Web. Kahle states: "I was standing there, looking at this machine that was the size of five or six Coke machines, and there was an 'aha moment' that said, 'You can do everything.'"

Thought and influences

Book digitization

Kahle has been critical of Google's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines digital access to the books they archive. Kahle describes Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tip-toeing around copyright issues, and further expresses his frustration in the lack of a decent loaning system for digital materials. He states the digital transition, thus far, has gone from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract". Kahle states that even public-domain material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, is still bound by contracts and requires a permission-based system from Google to be distributed or copied. Kahle reasons that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of staffing at libraries not having the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of the administrators to outsource information services.

Kahle states: "It’s not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers — and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read."

Other benefits of digitization

Kahle explains that apart from the value of an historian's use of these digital archives; that they might also serve to help with some common infrastructure complaints about the Internet, such as adding reliability to "404 Document not found" errors, contextualizing information to make it more trust-worthy, and maintaining navigation to aid in finding related content. Kahle also explains the importance of packaging enough meta-data (information about the information) into the archive, since we don't know what future researchers will be interested in, and that it might be more problematic in finding data rather than preserving data.

Physical media

"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle has said. "First it was in people's memories, then it was in manuscripts, then printed books, then microfilm, CD-ROMS, now on the digital internet. Each one of these generations is very important." Voicing a strong reaction to the idea of books simply being thrown away, and inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Kahle envisions collecting one copy of every book ever published. "We're not going to get there, but that's our goal," he said. "We want to see books live forever." Pointing out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere, he sees saving the physical artefacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future. (Alongside the books, Kahle plans to store the Internet Archive's old servers, which were replaced late last year.) He began by having conventional shipping containers modified as climate-controlled storage units. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about a million titles, with each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides. A given book may be retrieved in about an hour, and are not to be loaned out but used to verify contents recorded in another medium. Book preservation experts say he'll have to contend with vermin and about a century's worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that decays over time because of its own acidity. Peter Hanff, acting director of the Bancroft Library, the special collections and rare books archive at the University of California, Berkeley, says that just keeping the books on the west coast of the US will save them from the climate fluctuations that are the norm in other parts of the country.

Awards and appointments

• Bachelor of Science - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982
• National Academy of Engineering, 2010
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member 2005
• Library of Congress NDIIP advisory board
• NSF Cyber Infrastructure advisory board
• 2004 Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI).
• 2008 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award from the University of Illinois
• 2007 Knowledge Trust Honors award recipient
• Public Knowledge, IP3 award recipient
• 2009 "50 Visionaries Changing Your World", Utne Reader
• 2010 Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Alberta,
• 2010 Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award
• 2012 Software and Information Industry of America Peter Jackson Award SIIA Peter Jackson Award

Publications

Articles

• Responsible Party: Brewster Kahle: A Library of the Web on the Web New York Times, September 8, 2002
• O'Reilly Network: How the Wayback Machine Works - 21 January 2002
• O'Reilly Network: Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive and People's Technology - Interview by Lisa Rein. 22 January 2004
• ACM Queue: A Conversation with Brewster Kahle - June 2004
• Slate - The Archivist: Brewster Kahle made a copy of the Internet. Now, he wants your files. - 7 April 2005
• San Francisco Chronicle - A Man's vision: World Library Online - 22 November 2005
• Brewster's Keynote at Wikimania 2006
• B. Kahle and his relationship to Google (Cnet Article: Grant Funds Open-Source Challenge to Google Library) - 21. Dec 2006
• Mention in San Francisco Chronicle
• The Economist "The internet's librarian" - 5 March 2009
• "A Book Grab by Google" by Brewster Kahle (Washington Post Op-Ed 19.May.2009)
• Lend Ho! Brewster Kahle Is a Thorn in Google's Side Forbes November 16, 2009
• Brewster Kahle named one of the "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World (Utne Reader November–December 2009)
• Internet Archive founder turns to new information storage device – the book, The Guardian, 1 August 2011

Audio/Video

• Science Friday, 1993: The Future of the Internet Brewster Kahle, then President of WAIS, participates in the discussion.
• Library of Congress, Public Access to Digital Materials (RealVideo and slides) - 20 November 2002
• CSPAN - Digital Futures - Universal Access to All Knowledge - Video program of Brewster Kahle. 13 December 2004
• NerdTV Interview (video, audio, and transcript available) - 18 August 2005
• IT Conversations - Universal Access to All Knowledge - Audio program featuring Brewster Kahle. 16 December 2004
• IT Conversations - Tech Nation interview with Dr. Moira Gunn - 7 February 2006
• PBS NerdTV - Episode #4 An Interview with Brewster Kahle with Robert X. Cringley - 27 September 2005
• Los Angeles Times - [1] with Patt Morrison - 28 January 2012

External links

• Personal Blog
• Biography at The Internet Archive
  • Works by Brewster Kahle on Open Library at the Internet Archive
  • Talks and Writings of Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive
• Brewster Kahle at TED Conferences
• Appearances on C-SPAN, alternate link
• Works by Brewster Kahle at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Brewster Kahle in libraries (WorldCat catalog)