Brewster Kahle: A free digital library
Brewster Kahle construit une bibliothèque numérique libre
Brewster Kahle is an inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian. His Internet Archive offers 85 billion pieces of deep Web geology -- a fascinating look at the formation of the Internet over the years, and a challenge to those who would keep knowledge buried. Full bio
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Brewster Kahle - Digital librarianBrewster Kahle is an inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian. His Internet Archive offers 85 billion pieces of deep Web geology -- a fascinating look at the formation of the Internet over the years, and a challenge to those who would keep knowledge buried.
Why you should listen
Brewster Kahle's stated goal is "Universal access to all knowledge," and his catalog of inventions and institutions created for this purpose read like a Web's Greatest Hits list. In 1982 he helped start Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company specializing in text searching, and would go on to invent the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS, whose customers included the New York Times and the United States Senate.
But most notably, perhaps, Kahle is founder and director of the Internet Archive, a free service which steadfastly archives World Wide Web documents, even as they are plowed over by breakneck trends in commerce, culture and politics. (On his Wayback Machine, you can view pages as they appeared in web antiquity -- say, Yahoo! in 1996.) As a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he works to keep such information free and reachable.
Kahle is a key supporter of the Open Content Alliance and has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife operate a nonprofit organization, the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which funds the Internet Archive.
Brewster Kahle | Speaker | TED.com