Gadgetory

the idea the Internet Archive has helped the internet become the Library of Alexandria version 2 can we make all the books music video web pages software ever made by people available to everybody that wants have access to it technologically we can do this we started out by collecting websites because we thought that was very ephemeral media that was disappearing from the world but then we soon moved on to other kinds of published works we're trying to collect that and bring it into one place one library that serves the entire world it actually turns out to be quite doable a book is about a megabyte and the largest library in the world is the library of congress with 26 28 million books that makes 28 terabytes 28 terabytes isn't that much and you can apply that over and over again youtube or something like that or flickr if you go for all of it is too big for us so we just try to find the parts that are referred to by others and we archive those so where we are as a former church and the reason why we bought this building was it cuz it matched our logo and so we thought we'd flatten the floor make it into a library but what a library looks like is blue and clears we left the pews so I'm sitting on a pew right now and um we use it for working for having performances we even have a little statues of all of the people that have worked at the internet archive for three years or more in this space to make it a sort of a community place for open Internet conversation to happen when we started to collect the web most people cut low area they're crazy or kind of dumb for even trying I mean why bother the average life of a web page is a hundred days before it's either changed or deleted so if we didn't collect it most of the web would be gone now I think we have an idea in our heads that once it's been put out there is always going to be there it will never disappear that is absolutely not true I'd say we're information activists we are people that believe in the power of openness the key thing about the internet and the world wide web is that it's us it's all just us we've built a trusting celebration that is the world wide web over the last 20 years let's keep it going