"The thing that gets me springing out of bed in the morning and has for the last 20 years is the idea that we could have universal access to all knowledge," says Brewster Kahle, chairman of the board of the Internet Archive. The Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library with permanent access for researchers and scholars to historical collections in digital format. Kahle's quest begins "deep in the human psyche," but is planted in practicality, with detailed analyses of what's to be done: "Let's consider the question of how much information there is. If you break it down, it turns out to be not that big of a deal. The largest print library in the world, which is the Library of Congress, has about 28 million volumes. A book is about a megabyte. That's just the ASCII of a book, if you put it in Microsoft Word. So 28 million megabytes is 28 terabytes, which fits in a bookshelf and costs about $60,000 right now. Storing books in ASCII is no problem, and the scanned images are more but still affordable. Scanning books costs between $5 and $20. ... So books are doable, in terms of technology."
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:00 AM
