Patt Morrison Asks: The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle
The founder of the Internet Archive on his love of libraries, Web pages and pretty much all forms of information
Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day.
What he has found -- or more accurately, crafted -- are the means and the mechanisms to preserve the human record, the whole human record, in its many media, so other humans can get to it with a tap or a mouse click, on www.internetarchive.org and www.openlibrary.org.
For a geek who made his fortune in cutting-edge search engines, Kahle sure does love books and print. He taught his kids geometry out of a 19th century volume of Euclid and does hand-set letterpress printing in his basement.
Thanks to Kahle's Wayback Machine -- a search engine named in homage to a cartoon on "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" -- you can follow the history of vanished Web pages. At the archive's website, download a book that's in the public domain or borrow one -- electronically -- that's not.....
Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-morrison-brewster-kahle-20120128,0,4242619.column