Brewster Lurton Kahle ( ; born October 21, 1960)Alexa Internet profile
, via juggle.com. accessed November 24, 2010 is an American digital librarian, a

computer engineer Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and computer software, software. C ...

Internet entrepreneur An Internet entrepreneur is an owner, founder or manager of an Internet-based business. This list includes Internet company founders and people brought on to companies for their general business or accounting acumen, as is the case with some CEOs ...

, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge. Kahle founded the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

and Alexa Internet. In 2012, he was inducted into the

Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet.

.2012 Inductees
,

website. Last accessed September 26, 2017

Life and career

Kahle was born in New York City and raised in

Scarsdale, New York Scarsdale is a town and village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The Town of Scarsdale is coextensive with the Village of Scarsdale, but the community has opted to operate solely with a village government, one of several village ...

, the son of Margaret Mary (Lurton) and Robert Vinton Kahle, a mechanical engineer. He went to

Scarsdale High School Scarsdale High School (SHS) is a public high school in Scarsdale, New York, United States, a coterminous town and village in Westchester County, New York. It is a part of the Scarsdale Union Free School District. The school was founded in 1917. ...

. He graduated from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1982 with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

and

engineering Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...

, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The emphasis of his studies was

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

; he studied under

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

and W. Daniel Hillis.About
''Brewster Kahle's Blog''. Retrieved July 11, 2011. After graduation, he joined

Thinking Machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuse ...

team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the

Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...

, for six years (1983–1989). There, he and others developed the WAIS system, the first Internet distributed search and document retrieval system, a precursor to the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. In 1992, he co-founded, with

Bruce Gilliat Bruce Gilliat (born May 30, 1959) is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. ...

, WAIS, Inc. (sold to AOL in 1995 for $15 million), and, in 1996, Alexa Internet (sold to

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...

in 1999). At the same time as he started Alexa, he founded the

, which he continues to direct. In 2001, he implemented the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996. Kahle was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices of

Alta Vista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

, where he was struck by the immensity 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.' Kahle was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

(2010) for archiving, and making available, all forms of digital information. He is also a member of the

, a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

, and serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

Public Knowledge Public Knowledge is a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group. Founded in 2001 by David Bollier and Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge is primarily involved in the fields of intellectual property law, competition and choice in the digi ...

, the European Archive (now Internet memory) and the Television Archive. He is a member of the advisory board of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

, and is a member of the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure. In 2010 he was given an honorary doctorate in computer science from

Simmons College Institutions of learning called Simmons College or Simmons University include: * Simmons University, a women's liberal arts college in Boston, Massachusetts * Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically black college in Louisville, Kentucky * Ha ...

, where he studied library science in the 1980s. Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, run the Kahle/Austin Foundation. The Foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for its

GNU project The GNU Project () is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaborat ...

, among other projects, with a total giving of about 4.5 million dollars in 2011. In 2012, Kahle and banking veteran Jordan Modell established Internet Archive Federal Credit Union to serve people in New Brunswick, N.J. and

Highland Park, New Jersey Highland Park is a borough in Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States in the New York City metropolitan area. The borough is located on the northern banks of the Raritan River, in the Raritan Valley region. As of the 2020 United States Cens ...

, as well as participants in programs that alleviate poverty in those areas. The credit union voluntarily liquidated in 2015.

Digitization advocacy

Kahle has been critical of

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines' digital access to the books they archive. In a 2011 talk Kahle described Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tiptoeing around

copyright issue A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

s, and expressed his frustration with the lack of a decent loaning system for digital materials. He said the digital transition has moved from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract". Kahle stated that even

public-domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

material published before 1923, and not bound by

copyright law A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

, is still bound by Google's contracts and requires permission to be distributed or copied. Kahle reasoned that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of library staff without the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of the administrators to outsource information services. Kahle advocated in 2009:

It's not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book
digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...
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 Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
, 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

In 1997, Kahle explained that apart from the value for

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

s' use of these digital archives, they might also help resolve some common infrastructure complaints about the Internet, such as adding reliability to "404 Document not found" errors, contextualizing information to make it more trustworthy, and maintaining navigation to aid in finding related content. Kahle also explained the importance of packaging enough meta-data (information about the information) into the archive, since it is unknown what future researchers will be interested in, and that it might be more problematic to find data than to preserve it.

Physical media

"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said in 2011. "First it was in people's memories, then it was in

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in ...

s, then

printed Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The e ...

books, then

microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...

, 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 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault ( no, Svalbard globale frøhvelv) is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term stor ...

, Kahle envisioned collecting one physical 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 artifacts 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 in 2010.) He began by having conventional

shipping container A shipping container is a container with strength suitable to withstand shipment, storage, and handling. Shipping containers range from large reusable steel boxes used for intermodal shipments to the ubiquitous corrugated boxes. In the context of ...

s modified as climate-controlled storage units. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. As of 2011, Kahle had gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse is large enough to hold about a million titles, with each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box,

pallet A pallet (also called a skid) is a flat transport structure, which supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift, a pallet jack, a front loader, a jacking device, or an erect crane. A pallet is the structural foundat ...

and shipping container in which it resides. A given book may be retrieved in about an hour, not to be loaned out but to be used to verify contents recorded in another medium.

Book preservation The conservation and restoration of books, manuscripts, documents and ephemera is an activity dedicated to extending the life of items of historical and personal value made primarily from paper, parchment, and leather. When applied to cultural ...

experts commented he'll have to contend with

vermin Vermin (colloquially varmint(s) or varmit(s)) are pests or nuisance animals that spread diseases or destroy crops or livestock. Since the term is defined in relation to human activities, which species are included vary by region and enterpr ...

and about a century's worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that disintegrates over time because of its own acidity. Peter Hanff, deputy director of

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retai ...

, said 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

*2004 Paul Evan Peters Award from the

Coalition of Networked Information The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization whose mission is to promote networked information technology as a way to further the advancement of intellectual collaboration and productivity. Overview The Coalition for Network ...

(CNI). *2005 American Academy of Arts and Sciences *Library of Congress NDIIP advisory board *NSF Cyber Infrastructure advisory board *2007 Knowledge Trust Honors award recipient *200
Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award
from the University of Illinois *Public Knowledge, IP3 award recipient *2009 "50 Visionaries Changing Your World",

Utne Reader ''Utne Reader'' (also known as ''Utne'') ( ) is a digital digest that collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment, generally from alternative media sources including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music, and ...

*2010 National Academy of Engineering *2010 Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Alberta, *2010 Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award *2012 Software and Information Industry of America Peter Jackson Awar
SIIA Peter Jackson Award
*2012 Inducted into the

. *2013 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology

Publications

; Articles
Responsible Party: "Brewster Kahle: A Library of the Web on the Web"
''The New York Times'', 8 September 2002

O'Reilly Network, 21 January 2002

O'Reilly Network, interview by Lisa Rein, 22 January 2004
ACM Queue: "A Conversation with Brewster Kahle"
June 2004
The Archivist: "Brewster Kahle made a copy of the Internet. Now, he wants your files"
''Slate'', 7 April 2005
"A Man's vision: World Library Online"
''San Francisco Chronicle'', 22 November 2005

at

Wikimania 2006 Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

"Grant Funds Open-Source Challenge to Google Library"

Cnet ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

, 21 December 2006
2007 mention in San Francisco Chronicle

"The Internet's Librarian"
''The Economist'', 5 March 2009

''Washington Post'' Op-Ed, 19 May 2009

''Forbes'', 16 November 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 ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', 1 August 2011
Cobweb: "Can the Internet Be Archived?"
''The New Yorker'', 26 January 2015

''Slate'', 10 September 2015 ; Audio/Video
"The Future of the Internet"
''Science Friday'', 1993, Brewster Kahle, then President of WAIS, participant.

Library of Congress,

RealVideo RealVideo, or also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and was at version 10. RealVideo is supported ...

and slides, 20 November 2002
Digital Futures: "Universal Access to All Knowledge"

CSPAN Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN ) is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises many proceedings of the United States ...

video of Brewster Kahle, 13 December 2004 * IT Conversations
"Universal Access to All Knowledge"
audio, with Brewster Kahle, 16 December 2004 * PBS NerdTV
Episode #4 "An Interview with Brewster Kahle"
by Robert X. Cringely, video, audio, and transcript, 18 August 200
player link
27 September 2005 * IT Conversations

with Dr. Moira Gunn, 7 February 2006 * Los Angeles Times
Commentary
by Patt Morrison, 28 January 2012

Life and career

Digitization advocacy

Other benefits of digitization

Physical media

Awards and appointments

Publications

See also

References

External links