Brewster Kahle on Universal Access to Human Knowledge

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/003351.html

When Brewster Kahle sees a problem -- preferably a big, hairy, audacious problem -- he's likely to ask, without blinking, "Where do we start?" That's the approach he's taken to his (and our) current task, providing "universal access to all human knowledge."

Where most of us would be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the task, Brewster sees a challenge to be categorized and attacked systematically: Why can't we as a society share with all of our members the learning we've produced? What does that mean? Well, let's say there are 26 million books in the Library of Congress; 2-3 million sound recordings; maybe 100,000-200,000 theatrical releases and as many more video ephemera; 50 million websites; 1000 channels of television. For each chunk, the Internet Archive has a project: The Internet Bookmobile and million book project; live music archive; moving image collections; and, of course, the Wayback machine.

I knew about the Wayback Machine but only recently stumbled across references to the live music and video archives. I've pulled down a couple of Grateful Dead albums. I was never a serious Deadhead and I don't generally like country music but there's just something about their stuff...

I blame my old college room-mate, MF, for getting me semi-hooked on the Dead.