untangling_the_web

DOClD: 4046925
UNCLASSIFIEDHFOR OFFlelAL tJSE OP4L'f
some nasty impediments such as copyrights and, of course, money. None of this
deters Kahle, whose commitment to the preservation of the digital artifacts of our
time drives the Internet Archive. As Kahle puts it, "If you don't have access to the
past, you live in a very Orwellian world." Ironically, between the Internet Archive's
voracious appetite for websites, which many view as an invasion of privacy, and the
Alexa technology, which "monitors" web browsing through the "related links" feature
in browsers, many people think of Kahle as the Internet's "Big Brother."
In addition to trying to capture every publicly available webpage and making them
searchable via the Wayback Machine, Kahle is pressuring Google to give him a copy
of its database with something like a six-month delay to avoid competition with "live"
Google. So far, the search engine innovator has not yet come around to Kahle's way
of thinking, but Kahle has a way of persuading people and institutions to make a
"positive contribution to mankind" by contributing to the Archive.
Announced just 24 hours after Google went public with its own effort to digitize
several major library collections, the Internet Archive's plan to digitize the collections
of ten major libraries cannot be a coincidence. Among the libraries agreeing to
participate in the Internet Archive's project are:
~ Carnegie Mellon University and the Library of Congress Million Book Project
~ University of Toronto, Canada
~ Library of Congress American Memory Project
~ McMaster University, Canada
~ University of Ottawa, Canada
~ Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt
~ Indian Institute of Science, India
~ International Institute of Information Technology, India
~ Zhejiang University, China
~ European Archive, Netherlands
The goal? In Brewster Kahle's own words, "anyone with an Internet connection will
have access to these collections and the growing set of tools to make use of them.
In this way we are getting closer to the goal of Universal Access to All
Knowledge.,,104 Once again Internet Archive founder Kahle reinforces his reputation
104 Brewster Kahle. "Announcement: Open-Access Text Archives," 15 December 2004
(14 November 2006) .
268 UNCLASSIFIEDliFOR OFFICIAL l:JSE ONLY