That gives away software for free, trying to build the ofernet into the Library Alexandria for the digital age. Peter that sounds like the internet, doesnt it . Brewster the internet is getting there, but the average life of a webpage is only 100 days before it is changed or deleted. Peter 100 days . Brewster so weve built our culture on ever shifting sand. The archive takes a snapshot of the webpages on websites every two months. Snapshot, snapshot. Its been doing it since 1996 and offers it as a free service of the way back machine on archive. Org and it is used by hundreds of thousands of people a day. All of these things have disappeared either maliciously or sometimes just they drop off the net. Peter how many websites are there today . Brewster hundreds of millions, and they are coming and going all of the time, that we collect about 800 million pages every day. The total collection of about 800 billion urls. It is kind of huge, and it turns out that is only part of what we do. We also archived television, abc, nbc, fox, but also International Television and if you go to tv. Archive. Org, you can find clips of what other people said and put those on blog posts. The idea is so people can quote, compare and contrast, the critically about what happens on television. With jonaily show stewart, he did Something Like that with going and saying he said this, now he said that. Can we do that now . It is used by journalists and endusers all the time. It is a free library, a library on the internet. Peter why couldnt i just go to google and type in jon stewart . Brewster still find the jon stewart show and they may have put up certain clips from their on youtube, you might see a smattering, but you dont know what show it came from, it doesnt have that context of television. Hours is just a run of television. Pick bits and pieces of television before we shut it down, make it so the publishers arent unhappy with us but if you want the whole thing, we printed on a dvd or thumb drive and lend it to you, and you have to send it back. People want it for documentary and the like and go to the publishers to say can i use this clip for my documentary . Thes just like a library in sense that you are borrowing things from the library. We also do this with books. We digitized several thousand books a day, about a million books a year now, and digitizing these and weaving them into the net so that more and more wikipedia footnotes, if you go to a footnote and it has a page number, click on it and it opens right to the right page. Back and pagepage forward but if you want more of it, you have to borrow it and if someone has already checked it out, you have to wait, but at least you get a couple of pages see you can fact check and go deeper than wikipedia. If wikipedia is the encyclopedia of the internet, we want to be the library of the internet. Where do you go deeper . How do you get to the publi shed pages of humankind . What kind of Law Department do you have to have at the internet archive to handle all the rights . Brewster there isnt any Law Department at all. Are amy library, library. Is to not offend people or take make and feel like they have been taken advantage of so we dont make any money. With very Nonprofit Library and we cut short, like television. Is just clips. Cds,sic collection, with we try to link it over to spotify, so we have the albemarle album art, but it is only selections 30 seconds. Mussets older stuff. Thoses wacky and fun, so are downloadable and you can listen to them, but they sound like the ones you crank up, the horn and the dog, like that. Is largelyntury forgotten because it wasnt put on to records and cds. Peter how are you funded . Brewster the same way wikipedia or npr is funded. End of the year please donations, we get grants. Donationsird of our come from libraries to collect webpages for them. We collect webpages for the National Archives and the library of congress. We have a room inside the adams building. You should go visit had. It. It is part of a room in the library of congress where they bring book cards down and we are digitizing all day long. We have 20 locations around the country and now the world. Digitizing books. Ok, you think shouldnt this all be done by a robot or hasnt it been done by now . It isnt that it hasnt been done. If you look at the number of books on the internet archive, it goes up, up, up to 1923 and there is copyright. Isrything beyond that somewhat restricted so it goes up and then crash. Than decades of almost nothing online, then it comes back up again at the end of the 20th century or 21st century. We are missing the 20th century, and amazon itself all right, so it is not online, i can just buy the book. To go to amazon and people are studying what books by decade are available on amazon new and it goes up, up, up, 1923, crash. The 20th century is basically not online so we think there is so much information on it, and there is. Of this is good, but the 20th century, the published material is almost nonexistent. It is almost not there, so we are raising a generation and ourselves, really, on not the best we have to offer. Me basically have amnesia about the 20th century. Thats a pretty important century to not forget. We will be doomed to repeat it if we just forget the lessons from other times, so we are trying to go through the 20th century. Better world books is donating all the books we dont already have to the internet archives and they get those from and we are trying to basically fill in the 20th century and make it so all those wikipedia footnotes turn live. We even went and fixed the broken links in wikipedia, so wikipedia, the executive director of wikipedia was afraid that the truth might fracture if we didnt work on trying to make wikipedia stronger, cited by better sources that people would be citing sources that are available, but not good, and though citation words behind the scene on articles are based on how good those articles are and if you can see them. We committed to going and fixing all the broken links and filling in all the books and the journal literature that is linked to from wikipedia. We fixed 11 million broken links in wikipedia in the last couple of years and now, we are going through all of the books, finding them and replacing those with a blue link so you can click on it and go to it. If the books are missing, we try to find those books, digitize them, put them up. Peter how did you come up with this idea . Brewster came was a vision of the internet that a bunch of us, certainly i had, of what i wanted the internet to be. 1980, why dont we go and make the library of alexandria for the digital age . We had to build the computers and the internet and the World Wide Web and i helped participate in this. Yak, internet hall of fame, ive been at this stuff for a long time. Ive been building things before the web come helped get the publishers on the web, but by 1996, we had enough momentum that i thought i could turn to build a library. The idea is to make all the published works of mankind just one click away. Inyou are in a rural place africa and one access, you should have access. That was the dream i signed onto. We are in 2020 and still not there yet, but there is a mounting number of us saying, lets get there. Make aa good idea to hyper connected set of information. Lets do that. Some of what is motivating me is misinformation, fake news. People are just making stuff up and not being called on it because you cant get to the cited material. You cant go and say heres information. People are just making stuff up and we cant live that way, so weve convinced the whole generation to turn to the net. We dont go to libraries anymore the same way. Booksprobably not to pull except kids books and things like that, audiobooks, great. Reference materials . It is the net and the net isnt good enough yet. We are working on it. We are the 300th most popular website. We have 4 million users every day that come to us and look for information. Some people just want to live in their bubbles, but an awful lot want to go deeper and the internet archive is part of that ecosystem. Peter you had a little alexa at onelled point. Brewster it was a company amazon. Com bought. It is actually not the little talking widget. Alexa was named for the library of alexandria. I worked directly for jeff bezos for three years, terrific time, really smart guy, and hopefully peter hopefully he paid you in stock. Brewster he did, and the smartest thing i did was not sell all of that so it has helped the internet archive grow and grow. Thank you to jeff bezos and steve case, who bought my company before that. He ran america online. Americaa company that online bought. Five been very fortunate but it was all toward the goal of building the library. Since 1980, ive only had one idea and so im just trying to stay at it. By 2020, october 20 20 i set the school years ago, lets be able to say gold years ago, lets be able to say the internet is a library. The internet is a library and it will have all the features that we grew up with, whether it is the old periodicals, it has reliable access that is card catalog that you can find things. Can we actually make the library of the digital age come to be, that has enough to raise educated citizens . If we dont, we are going to end up with a generation that learns from whatever they have in front forhem, and if it is paid stuff from political points of view for foreign points of view or just strolling people that are making stuff up, we are going to end up with a mess. We are sort of seeing my plan out, so why dont we go and stand up and help out the facebooks, the twitters, that are trying to make referenceable material not as much as they should be but how do we make it possible so people can go and know what it is they are looking at . But at may be made up, least you can know it is made up based on the analysis of the authors of the materials. How can we build an internet that is a global brain that we can learn to trust . Right now, we are in this position where it is starting to be scary out there. People are starting to worry that maybe the internet is just but we dont have another alternative to go to otherwise, so how do we go and reinforce, make some websites that want to be better able to be better come a referenceable. How do we help authors, contributors . Had we give them access to the library of the books in the library so they can reference right to it . How can we give the readers my favorite thing, recently with weaving the books into the web with wikipedia was my nextdoor neighbor. Shes 15 years old, and i was telling her we are going to digitize books, weve them into wikipedia. She lit up. She said i want that. I never get a rise out of my 15yearold nextdoor neighbor and i said why do you want that . She said my school to let me quote wikipedia in my richers research papers. Thats not good enough. You have to follow through, and if i could click on it and open the book, i could do my homework in the middle of the night. Thats good, right . Thats what we want. We want people to be able to go deeper and make it so that publishers still sell books of a storm coming in a cell even more books, but readers get the books, music,t of radio, old periodicals that they know where it came from and what they can trust. Peter you have nine months for your 40yearold goal. Are you going to make it . Brewster well, we are trying to get they say in silicon valley, the minimal viable product. Can we have enough to do this . Phillipsandover, academy andover, they went and had the full library, they lent it to us so we could digitize it, and we now have the full library of one of the best prep now as in the country, is High School Library for anybody that wants that access. Isnt that great . Is agrove college, which college that just went out of business, unfortunately in detroit. It was a Catholic Girl School and became coed, but just last year was its last time, and what they did with their library was they donated it to the internet archive, and now, were in the process of digitizing over the next nine months, we will now have a College Library and a complete prep school library, plus about 1. 2 million other books, and if we can get up to a aboutof 4 million books, an 80 million project, so a lot of money but doable, we would have you, princeton, or boston public Class Library available to anybody who wanted it on the internet. Thats the dream of what we are going for. We will start with these first steps, and weaving them into wikipedia for people to find them. Thats just on the book side. The web side is going well and we are using it to help journalists be able to know when our things being disappeared by people, and being able to keep some of the web referenceable, even though they may have been taken away. Peter what are the mechanics of digitization . The someone have to stand there page by page by page . Brewster lets take book digitization. It holds the book like this so it doesnt break the binding, and it raises and lowers glass with a foot pedal. Think of it as a workout. If you raise and lower class, it clickns the page, goes click. A person turned the page. , shouldnt that ill be done with a robot . We tried. I tried to create a Robot Company that would get this to work and it rips books and was inefficient and broke a lot, so we just said, lets just have people do it. People are doing this now at a couple thousand books a day. Google has already digitized an enormous number of books, and some of them are available, but they got caught up in copyright so our approach of doing digitize and lend, where we have a physical copy, we digitize it, and only one reader at a time can read it. So you can get a couple of pages to preview it like an amazon, look inside the book, but if you want the whole thing, you check it out for two weeks. Then it comes back and the next person wants it. Any time there is one book or three copies or other libraries have those, they can lend them out, as well. It is restricted. It is not even all that great because it is pretty restricted, balanced with the copyright interest to make sure there are no more copies floating around than were originally purchased from publishers. Peter Brewster Kahle, in 1980, when you came up with this idea, was it a Lightning Strike or was it just a gradual thought process . What were you doing . Brewster i was walking over the Charles River. A friend of mine posed this question, which has really haunted me, although it has directed me all of these years, which was Brewster Kahle, you are a technologist, you are also a utopian idealist. Isnted portrait that positive of your technology. We are good at complaining about things whether it is nuclear war or nicaragua, but coming up with a positive vision was much harder. I can only come up with two ideas. Home was trying to save peoples privacy, even though people are going to throw it away. The other was build a library about everything. I thought a library of everything was too obvious so i started working on the privacy one and i found it was too difficult to try to make costeffective privacy devices by making chips in 1980, so i went to plan b, and ive never turned back. There are a number of us who had this vision of what the internet, the World Wide Web should be and time to deliver. Weve made progress. It is easy to say, the internet it also hasle, but all sorts of terrific things and participation by lots of people. But we need better tools to make our way through it. It feels like a delusion. Deluge. It feels sometimes even threatening to people and by people being actively spreading disinformation and misinformation, we need better tools, so im not going to let this go the wrong way. There is a large number we are 150 people at the internet archive, but there are thousands and thousands of others who are all participating. Wikipedia, Public Library of a, the openzill source world, they all have the same general dream of building something that is more than just ourselves. It is an information interconnection that connects people with information that they need. It gives them an idea of what they can leave behind by writing things that will endure. That is the dream of the internet that im still after and many, many others are, as well. Peter what was your role in the development of the internet and the World Wide Web . Did you have one . Brewster the actual internet i was on the side, more or less. For a time, i was part of the Engineering Steering Group of the internet, how you build it, but i was not the leader of that. Was a system for how to be the first publishing system on the internet and i did that, it was called waze. It became before the web, which is privately why i am in the internet that probably why i am in the hall of fame, but when tim bernerslee got the technology going, all of these technologies. Folded in. It was part of that, but the web was better. I tried to get publishers online. I got the, the new york , ap, i gotrs them all on board by getting these things online, so the open world worked. This is a time when it could have been in the small silos of , aol,nexis or compuserve they were very controlled but we wanted an open environment where everyone could be a publisher. A little bit of wild west. Era butkey part of that once that era started going and i sold to aol, i started building the library itself. To that, we are trying we architect the web to be more decentralized. Can we make a decentralized web . Even though you may be blocked in some countries, you still get access to it, or if one publisher goes away, then it is still replicated in other places. A peertopeer backend for the web is a new and Exciting Development that is coming out of some of the same people in bitcoin and other decentralized technologies. Can we keep the web architecture itself moving forward. Peter you mentioned the Charles River in boston cambridge. Were you employed by m. I. T. At the time . Brewster i was a student at m. I. T. , studying Artificial Intelligence and my minor was buddhism. Some of the era. I got to learn one of the great things i learned was think big. Come up with a goal that you wont achieve in your lifetime. Achieving your goal is a little overstated. A big can come up with idea, whether it is Artificial Intelligence, seems like a good idea