Brewster Kahle, Founder/Director, Internet Archive
Open access, the ability to see things for free, but also download and use things for new and different purposes.
How do we go about building large digital libraries?
“From shelves to servers” (Chinese digital library folks)
Boston Public Library inscription carved over door, “Free to All.”
Opportunity: universal access to all knowledge, perserved and accessible.
- “man on the moon” opportunity
What services will libraries perform? Get from companies? Or public institutions acting like companies?
What will be open access and what will not? What will be “free to all” and what will not?
Text
- scan book on shelf, on-demand print and bind
- about $.01/page
- $100 laptop, wireless networking
- Million Book Project: found that the robotic scanning was not efficient, so built own, wanted to achieve $.10/page
- LC could be put online for $800M.
- doing about 12,000 books/month
- 150,000 books available on Internet Archive at this time.
Audio
- 2-3 million published
- legal issues are thorny
- working with communities that want to get audio recordings out there
- folk music, ethnic music, lectures
- adding a band or two per day
- $10 per disk, $10 per hour
- 100,000 items in 100 collections
- $30-40M to digitize it all
Moving images
- more than Hollywood (150,000), plus legal issues
- archival films, new generations of film
- ads, gov films
- mashups
- new genres (e.g., Lego movies)
- television archive, 20 channels, 24 hours/day, started in 2000
- issues of provenance, role of libraries?
- $15 per video hour to digitize
- 50,000 videos available now, 1M hours of TV
- 55,000 items in 100 collections, not all freely available
Software
- 15,000 titles over time
- doable, but copy protection is problemmatic
- gamers are doing this
- perserve bits and emulation
Web archive
- snapshots of web pages
- 85B pages, 1.5 PB
- way back machine
- 300-500 requests/second
- 100 TB with every snapshot
- people are using it for their own old stuff
Preservation of digital materials
- don’t have one copy
- system of international libraries, collecting regional stuff and swap with other libraries
Will we rise to the opportunity?
- $12B per year…already spending
- What will happen to the public domain?
- Do we follow proprietary mechanisms? Or open solutions?
Unkowns:
- public? private?
- free? open?
- public or perish!
To the extent that libraries play the commercial game, they will do it badly. Libraries are engines of innovation, materials need to remain available for use.Open Content Alliance: to put forward ideas and actions along these lines.
Universal access to all knowledge…can be one or our greatest achievements.
Challenge to library community: The technology is now available to digitize books and other materials, including archival material, but very few libraries are picking up the ball to get collections digitized. R&D has produced the tools, now we need to use them.
