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Internet Archive opened its doors to librarians visiting San Francisco for ALA 2015. Brewster Kahle, founder and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive, led the tours and gave some fascinating background to th
Internet Archive opened its doors to librarians visiting San Francisco for ALA 2015. Brewster Kahle, founder and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive, led the tours and gave some fascinating background to their new building, work, and future directions. Now housed in a former Christian Science Church, Internet Archive HQ has positioned its servers in the large niches at the back of what was the sanctuary. I found this to be a fitting visual statement of the organization’s daunting mission, “universal access to all knowledge.” It seems that nothing is beyond their digital reach. Internet Archive is in the persistent business of digitizing just about anything from text, audio, moving images, to software and archiving web pages. For instance, made available to the public through their Wayback Machine, Internet Archive captures a snapshot of thousands of web pages a day. Don’t forget to share Internet Archive with your students and patrons as another resource to add to their research tools. I found Kahle’s challenge to those of us on the tour interesting fodder for discussion. He said that the younger generation of researchers expect everything to be online, available digitally. We know that’s not the case. But, Kahle asserts, let’s try to live up to that expectation rather than change their expectations.
Fun random fact: If you've worked at Internet Archive for 3+ years, they'll make a little statue of you! Kahle asked our tour group if that was creepy or cool. What do you think?
