The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive 
Brewster Kahle at Foo Camp, 2009 by Joi Ito from WikiMedia. CC BY 2.0.
The replacement of our vintage library with a state of the art learning center moves us further into the 21st century right here at Serra. The Internet is no different. Everyday it moves forward with new technology, new websites and revamped ones – beckoning us to move forward with it. According to Manoush Zomorodi, writing for NPR, “The average webpage is deleted or changed in just 100 days.” So what happens to the old webpages? Do they simply disappear? Not on Brewster Kahle’s watch. Zomorodi informs us that, “Kahle is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a free service that archives World Wide Web documents. In 2001, he implemented the Wayback Machine, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996.” We have been warned many times that the Internet is forever. And Brewster Kahle is helping to keep it that way.
The Internet Archive houses the immensely popular Wayback Machine – a 21st century version of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. If we check our calendar right now we can see that it is April, 2023. If we take a peek at Serrahs.com, we are presented with this month’s calendar of events and so forth. But perhaps today we are feeling nostalgic for the fall of 2019 when our seniors were just freshmen and a pandemic was the last thing on our minds. With the Wayback Machine, we can go there, digitally. Let’s go right now! A snapshot of the 2019 homepage with fun headlines is one of many page grabs housed in the Wayback Machine. Handy in finding articles that have since disappeared and webpages that no longer exist, the Wayback Machine is preserving internet history for all, not to mention offering a bit of nostalgia for those of us looking for some.
But the Internet Archive is more than just old webpages and articles from days gone by. It is soooo much more than that. It digitizes television news, vintage Android Apps, old comic books, and has an entire section devoted to musical recordings of The Grateful Dead. Watch a 1976 commercial for Frosted Flakes, and download 2002 Desktop Pacman from the Classic PC Games Collection. This is just the tip of the iceberg. One can easily fall down the rabbit hole with no desire to come back out, so fascinating are the things housed in this vast electronic library. The astounding amount of information stored, and accessible to the public, is measured in petabytes. Yes, petabytes are a thing – a thing made up of more than 1000 terabytes. Is there a unit of measure larger than a petabyte? Yes that would be the exabyte, but we digress and you can read about those units of measurement here, compliments of IBM.
So where in the heck are the servers that house all these petabytes? Well, gosh, would it shock you to know that all those petabytes are practically around the corner on Funston Street in San Francisco? Of course not, because our general neighborhood is drowning in terabytes, petabytes and, soon, other sorts of bytes that do not even exist yet. The Bay Area doesn’t run without bytes. That’s our jam. And Brewster Kahle’s too. He is the father of Amazon’s Alexa and creator of the “crawler” program that started snapping up shots of webpages during the 1990s. The Internet Archive has crawled a long way since then. San Francisco Chronicle writer Chase DiFelicianton visited the Funston Street location and interviewed Kahle in 2021. When asked about the importance of capturing websites for storage and posterity, DiFelicianton wrote, “Kahle said in the past that if one library and its books burned, copies probably lived on in another physical space. ‘That’s not the case on the web,’ he said. For example ‘If a newspaper goes offline in Turkey, all of their archives go. And that’s not the way you can run a culture.’” Some forward thinking people are even saving their own pages using the Wayback Machine – another of its popular uses. Writing a blog or creating a new website and worried it might *Poof* disappear due to fickle technology? The Internet Archive Blog article “If You See Something, Save Something – 6 Ways to Save Pages In the Wayback Machine” walks us through the steps to save it into the Internet Archive without waiting for crawlers to make the rounds. Anyone can do it.
Plus there are books. Lots and lots of books. The Internet Archive has digital copies of more than 20 million books. As their Text Archive states, “The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 2.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.” That’s a lot of book bytes, as well as a controversy. As SF Chronicle writer DiFelicianton tells it, “The archive has for years purchased and digitized books, lending them out through its site for free with a wait list like other libraries. But when the coronavirus pandemic hit [in 2020] and libraries and schools closed down, the archive created what it called the National Emergency Library, a collection of 1.4 million online books available to users without a wait…A lawsuit filed by four of the nation’s largest publishing houses soon followed, one of the many challenges the archive faces in its quest for freedom of navigation rights in cyberspace. Kahle maintains that copyright laws don’t bar libraries like his from owning, digitizing and lending books out with certain controls in place.”
But only weeks ago, on March 26th, a New York judge did not agree and ruled against Kahle and the Internet Archive. Joe Hernandez, reporter for NPR, quotes U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl’s opinion, “At bottom, IA’s fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book…But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.”
Kahle and the Internet Archive are expected to appeal this ruling. Releasing a statement through the Internet Archive Blog, Kahle says, “Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books. This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.” As the battle wages on, you can follow along and even lend support in Battle for Libraries. Supported by authors like Cory Doctorow and Musicians such as Peter Gabriel, the Internet Archive is committed to providing, “…an archive of out-of-print, midlist, local, and diverse texts in addition to popular books. 37 million of them. And anyone with an internet connection can check out whatever they’d like to read.”
Despite this ruling there are still many books available to borrow from the Internet Archive. A free membership allows for the borrowing of up to ten digital books at a time. For more information about the process, please head to their Help page for easy to understand instructions and answers to all your questions.
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