Brewster Kahle

Founder of the Internet Archive and cofounder of Alexa Internet

• Born: October 22, 1960
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Primary Company/Organization: Internet Archive

Introduction

Since the mid-1980s, Brewster Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. As a digital librarian, he has played a major role in making information easy to find and widely available through the Internet. Kahle is most famous for founding the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library with the mission of “universal access to all knowledge.” An idealist with focus and discipline, Kahle would like to save a copy of every type of information resource on Earth.

Early Life

Brewster Kahle (pronounced "kale") was born on October 22, 1960, in New York City and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. He graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1978 and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also took library science courses at Simmons College. Kahle wanted to create a type of technology that would help people, and that led him to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he studied under Marvin Minsky and Danny Hills. Minsky and Hills taught Kahle two mantras: “Think big” and “What will serve the greatest good?” At the time, the two biggest concepts being discussed by those in technology and futurists were encryption and digital libraries. After graduating from MIT in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in computer science, Kahle decided to take on both.

Life's Work

After graduation, Kahle joined Artificial Intelligence Laboratory colleague Hills and five other MIT alumni to form Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. From 1983 to 1989, Kahle was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection Machine, a series of supercomputers intended for applications in artificial intelligence, symbolic processing, and text searching. The most famous invention created by Thinking Machines, however, was the Wide Area Information Server, or WAIS, system. WAIS was originally developed for supercomputers to give them fast access to very large databases. It was an electronic publishing system that allowed users to ask remote information sources questions in natural language so that the server could retrieve the best-matched documents. WAIS was a precursor to the World Wide Web and modern search engines.

In 1992, Kahle teamed with Bruce Gilliat to found WAIS, Inc., which he sold to America Online in 1995 for $15 million. Kahle used some of that money to move to San Francisco and build Alexa Internet with Gilliat In 1996. Alexa was named after the Library of Alexandria, for Kahle believed that the Internet had the potential to become a repository of knowledge as significant as the library at Alexandria had been to the ancient world. Improving on the WAIS natural language search system, Alexa Internet provided a toolbar that would make suggestions to Internet users regarding popular sites, based on the traffic patterns of its users. Alexa Internet also archived every active website on the Internet. For each website that it archived, Alexa Internet would record the person or company who registered it, how many pages it had, the number of other sites that referred to it, and how frequently it was updated. Kahle donated a copy of this archive to the Library of Congress in 1998. In 1999, Kahle sold Alexa Internet to Amazon.com for $250 million in Amazon stock.

At the same time that he started Alexa, Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive, which he continues to direct. Originally, Kahle worked with Gilliat in developing software to “crawl” and download all publicly accessible Internet pages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews bulletin board system, and downloadable software. These formed the first contents of the Internet Archive. In l999, Kahle decided to collect other digital materials for the archive, starting with the Prelinger Archives, a collection of films about the cultural history of the United States. Today, the Internet Archive contains e-books, text, audio, video, and software. The Internet Archive is of value not only to historians, but also to web developers and computer scientists who want to solve Internet infrastructure issues.

In 2001, Kahle implemented the so-called Wayback Machine, named after the time-travel invention used by the characters Sherman and Peabody from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. The Wayback Machine is a service that allows public access to the archived web pages of the past, which the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996. Kahle was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices of AltaVista (the search provider for Yahoo!), where he saw an enormous computer, the size of five or six Coke machines, used to store and index everything that was on the Web.

The Internet Archive hosts many other projects, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the open source wiki library catalog and book information site Open Library. Over the years, work has included providing information services for the print-disabled.

Kahle is a major supporter of the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, free, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. The Internet Archive provides scanning, storage, and access services for the OCA through its website. OCA was founded in reaction to Google Book Search and Google's book digitization practices. Kahle has been a vocal critic of Google's digital practices, which he has regarded as a for-profit operation. Kahle prefers locally controlled, nonprofit information resources with access unfettered by contracts and licenses. At the same time, he realizes that the digital transition is becoming centralized, homogeneous, and for-profit because most traditional libraries do not have the money, staff, or expertise to create their own unique digital book collections.

In 2020, when the world was upended by the global COVID-19 pandemic, Kahle grew concerned that schools, libraries, and other sources of information were closed to people. He was particularly concerned about the disruption to education. His answer was the National Emergency Library, a digital book collection that he opened to the public. However, four publishers sued him for "willful mass copyright infringement." The issue proved to be divisive, with groups that represent authors aligning with each side. The publishers won, and the archive was forced to remove all of their copyright-protected books. Kahle's argument all along was that digital copies of books should be treated the way hard copies of books are bought, sold, and shared. Once a customer, including a library, purchases a physical book, they can do as they please with it, including lending it as often as they wish and selling it and keeping the purchase price. However, libraries do not own digital books. They must purchase licenses from copyright holders to lend the e-books. These subscriptions to digital books may limit the number of times they can be lent or define the time--a year, for example--during which the library may lend the books.

Inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (a secure underground vault in Norway that is designed to preserve copies of plant seeds in worldwide gene banks), Kahle's dream is to collect one copy of every book ever published. He has purchased a warehouse on the West Coast, which is estimated to hold one million titles, and has converted conventional shipping containers to serve as climate-controlled storage units. One day, he would like to be able to provide a digital or print-on-demand copy to anyone in the world. In 2009, Kahle invented a technology called BookServer, which gives any author, publisher, or library the opportunity to make a scanned book available for free, for sale, or for loan. Using Bookserver, as well as a book scanner he invented called Scribe, Kahle built a print-on-demand bookmobile, which he drove around San Francisco with his son. Based on his experience, he started the nonprofit organization Anywhere Books. Anywhere Books sent print-on-demand bookmobiles to Uganda to provide books for poor and rural populations.

Kahle is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has served on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Television Archive. He received an honorary doctorate in computer science from Simmons College in 2010 and an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Alberta. Kahle has won numerous awards, including the 2004 Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the 2008 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award from the University of Illinois, the 2010 Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award from the California Library Association, and the 2012 Peter Jackson Innovation Award from the Software and Information Industry of America.

Personal Life

Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, run the Kahle/Austin Foundation. The foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for its work promoting GNU, a free, Unix-like operating system. Kahle maintains the blog Brewster.kahle.org, where he writes articles about housing, education, food, and health in the United States. Kahle has one son, Logan, who is “custom schooled.”

Bibliography

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Gratzinger, Ollie. "The Internet Archive: Founded by Brewster Kahle, https://archive.org/about/." American Journalism, vol. 38, no. 2, 2021, pp. 249-251. DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2021.1912531. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Hardy, Quentin. “Lend Ho!” Forbes 29 Oct. 2009. Web. 20 June 2012.

Kahle, Brewster. “Brewster Kahle: Founder, WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet.” Interview by Jessica Livingston. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. New York: Springer, 2008. Print.

---. “A Conversation with Brewster Kahle: Creating a Library of Alexandria for the Digital Age.” Interview by Stewart Feldman. 9 July 2004. Association for Computing Machinery. Web. 20 June 2012.

---. “Preserving the Internet.” The Future of the Web. New York: Rosen, 2007. Print.

Streitfeld, David. "The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco." The New York Times, 17 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Technology Quarterly. “The Internet's Librarian.” 5 Mar. 2009. Web. The Economist. 20 June 2012.

"2012 Inductee: Brewster Kahle." Internet Hall of Fame, 2012, www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/brewster-kahle/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.