Brewster Kahle | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Kahle in 2015 | |
| Born | Brewster Lurton Kahle[1] (1960-10-21)October 21, 1960 (age 64)[2] |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SB) |
| Occupation(s) | Digital librarian Computer engineer Internet entrepreneur |
| Employer(s) | Internet Archive,Electronic Frontier Foundation |
| Known for | Development ofWAIS Co-founder ofAlexa Internet Founder ofInternet Archive |
| Spouse | Mary Austin |
| Children | 2[3] |
| Website | brewster |
Brewster Lurton Kahle (/ˈbruːstərkeɪl/BROO-stərKAYL;[4] born October 21, 1960)[2] is an American digital librarian,[5] computer engineer, and Internet entrepreneur. He graduated from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 with aBachelor of Science degree incomputer science and engineering. Kahle founded theInternet Archive (includingWayback Machine) and co-foundedAlexa Internet in 1996. He was inducted into theInternet Hall of Fame in 2012.[4]
Kahle was born inNew York City and raised inScarsdale, New York, the son of Margaret Mary (Lurton) and Robert Vinton Kahle, amechanical engineer.[6][7] He went toScarsdale High School. He graduated from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, receiving aBachelor of Science degree with a major incomputer science and engineering, where he was a member ofChi Phi fraternity.[8][9] The emphasis of his studies wasartificial intelligence; he studied underMarvin Minsky andW. Daniel Hillis.[8]
After graduation, Kahle joined theThinking Machines team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, theConnection Machine, for six years (1983–1989).[10] There, he and others developed theWAIS system, the first Internet distributed search and document retrieval system, a precursor to theWorld Wide Web.[10][11] In 1992, he co-founded, withBruce Gilliat, WAIS, Inc. (sold toAOL in 1995 for $15 million[12]), and, in 1996,Alexa Internet[11][13] (sold toAmazon.com in 1999[14] for $250 million in stock[15]). At the same time as he started Alexa, he founded theInternet Archive, which he continues to direct.
In 2001, he implemented theWayback Machine, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996.[10][11] Kahle was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices ofAlta Vista, 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 sixCoke machines, and there was an 'aha moment' that said, 'You can do everything.'"[16]
Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, run the Kahle/Austin Foundation. The Foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for itsGNU Project,[17] among other projects, with a total giving of about $4.5 million in 2011.[18]
In 2012, Kahle and banking veteran Jordan Modell established Internet Archive Federal Credit Union to serve people inNew Brunswick, N.J. andHighland Park, New Jersey, as well as participants in programs that alleviate poverty in those areas.[19] Following legal violations and a cease-and-desist from theNational Credit Union Administration, the credit union was liquidated in December 2015.[20]
Kahle was elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering (2010) for archiving, and making available, all forms of digital information. He is also a member of theInternet Hall of Fame, a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kahle serves on the boards of theElectronic Frontier Foundation,Public Knowledge, theEuropean Archive (nowInternet memory) and the Television Archive. He is a member of the advisory board of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of theLibrary of Congress, and is a member of theNational Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure.
In 2010, Kahle received an honorary doctorate fromSimmons University.[21]
In 1997, Kahle explained that apart from the value forhistorians' 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.[22]
Kahle has been critical ofGoogle'sbook 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 aroundcopyright issues, and expressed his frustration with the lack of a decentlending 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 evenpublic-domain material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, 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 administrators tooutsource information services.[23]
Kahle advocated in 2009:
It's not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-bookdigital 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 simpleWeb 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.[24]
"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said in 2011. "First it was in people's memories, then it was inmanuscripts, thenprinted books, thenmicrofilm,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 theSvalbard Global Seed Vault, 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.[25]
Kahle began by having conventionalshipping containers modified asclimate-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 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 experts commented he will have to contend withvermin and about a century's worth of books printed onwood pulp paper that disintegrates over time because of its own acidity. Peter Hanff, deputy director ofUC Berkeley'sBancroft Library, 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.[25]
In 2024 Kahle shipped 350,000 (mainly European) dissertations from the stacks ofLeiden University Library to storage of the Internet Archive in Pennsylvania. These dissertations, from the period 1850-1990, were deselected by the Leiden Library.[26][27]
Kahle maintains ablog, described as "Thoughts about Housing, Education, Food and Health in the United States".[28]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Brewster Kahle, the man behind a project to file every webpage, now wants to gather one copy of every published book
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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