![]() ![]() The Internet Archive is working to change that. So we're if we're going to be bringing up our kids with this as their whole experience of information, we better put the best we have to offer within reach of our children – and it's not there now.” “People aren't going and necessarily hunting things down in libraries in the way that they used to 50 years ago. “If it's not online, it's as if it doesn't exist,” says Kahle. All this stuff that might otherwise disappear – or, at least, remain inaccessible to most people. Or recordings of a Grateful Dead concert from the 1980s (there are over 95 million downloads of those). Old stuff like a copy of Dracula from 1897. We get between two and three million users a day,” says Kahle. “Every time a light blinks, someone is either uploading something or downloading something from the Internet Archive. Inset in a space that looks like it should hold a statue of a saint or something, instead stand three towers of compact, black computer servers, illuminated by blinking blue lights. One of those adaptations is humming right behind me. “So we thought, ‘Why don't we just take it slow and we'll have the building adapt to us and we'll adapt to the building?’” “So we thought when we bought this place that we would flatten the floor and make it into a library, but exactly what a library looks like or is like in the future, we don't know,” says Kahle. The floor is sloped like an amphitheater. There are real pews in here, arranged in a wide half-circle facing an altar. We’re in a cavernous room lit by daylight streaming in through big, stained-glass windows. But the first thing I see is a full-on church. He pays for all of this with money he earned early in his tech career, and from foundations.Īs Kahle leads us up to the second floor, I can hear the faint hum of hard drives. Kahle and a team of more than 50 engineers, programmers, archivists and volunteers are doing that right in this building. “And it turns out,” Kahle says, “technologically, you can do it.” The Internet Archive is trying to prevent this from ever happening. Nowadays, that would be like if we lost all of Shakespeare, or you could never watch The Wire again. That’s when it burned and everything inside was destroyed. It’s said to have housed every book – or scroll, I should say – ever written, up until the first century, BC. It was one of the biggest and most important libraries of the ancient world. The library of Alexandria, version one, was in Egypt. “The idea was to try to build the library of Alexandria, version two,” explains Kahle. Kahle is leading me and about 15 other people on a tour of this old church, which now houses the gigantic internet project he founded 20 years ago, the Internet Archive. “We bought this building because it matched our logo,” Kahle says. That’s a happy coincidence, according to Brewster Kahle. Come to think of it, it actually looks a lot like the building I just stepped inside. The first thing I see when I open the doors is a black doormat with a white image of what looks like a Roman temple. There are big white columns out front, with pink steps leading up to iron double doors.īut what goes on inside this church is not quite what you’d expect. ![]() In San Francisco’s Richmond District, where Geary Boulevard meets Park Presidio, there stands a bright, white, defunct Christian Science church.
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