“I’m probably best known for being part of Web 1.0.”
“I’m going to argue that Universal Access to All Knowledge is possible.”
Altavista said, let’s just index the whole web. Jeff Bezos said, let’s just sell all books. People who focus on doing it all are being pretty successful in the business world.
Texts: how much is there? Library of Congress = 26 terabytes. $60,000 of storage. Price of a house — or, around here, a garage. Costs about $10 a book to scan a book. $260 million. [I’ll need to doublecheck these numbers!]
Question of copyright. What do we do with the out of print but still under copyright stuff? the orphans? — most of the 20th century. 8 million books. We’re not allowed to digitize them. We filed a lawsuit. Kahle v. Ashcroft — to try to allow us to bring out of print but under copyright works onto the night. To do this in the not-for-profit sphere.
It turns out you can print and bind a book for a buck. That’s cheap — cheaper than a library, Harvard says it costs them $2 to lend a book. Bookmobile project. The idea of going book to book — book, scan it, put it on the net, download it, print it, bind it: book to book.
Let’s go to audio. 2-3 million disks that have ever been sold. It’s a very litigated area. Lots of people aren’t served terribly well by the publishing industry. Bands that want to circulate their concert recordings: Grateful Dead. Community-based thing. Folk music, “fringe” areas. Non profit record labels. To people publishing under Creative Commons licenses, we are offering unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free. If you want to give stuff away, there’s institutional support to help make it happen.
Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable. Copyright issues. Educational films. Mostly being used by others to build new films. Genre of Lego movies.
Television. Recording 20 channels of TV 24 hours a day. Around a petabyte of this stuff. Making it available is still problematic.
Software: copyright office allowing them to archive it.
The Web archive. [He’s showing the original Yahoo home page.’] Kind of looks like Google today. Pets.com.
Preservation and access: the idea is to not have one copy on top of the san andreas faultline. Copies in Alexandria and Amsterdam.
Will we do it? Lots of business opportunities, already spun off four little companies. This is interesting, it requires govt, non-profits and for-profits to work together. Make something we’re really proud of to pass on to the next generation.
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