Patt Morrison Asks: The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle [View all]

[Robb]

The founder of the Internet Archive on his love of libraries, Web pages and pretty much all forms of information

Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day.

What he has found -- or more accurately, crafted -- are the means and the mechanisms to preserve the human record, the whole human record, in its many media, so other humans can get to it with a tap or a mouse click, on www.internetarchive.org and www.openlibrary.org.

For a geek who made his fortune in cutting-edge search engines, Kahle sure does love books and print. He taught his kids geometry out of a 19th century volume of Euclid and does hand-set letterpress printing in his basement.

Thanks to Kahle's Wayback Machine -- a search engine named in homage to a cartoon on "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" -- you can follow the history of vanished Web pages. At the archive's website, download a book that's in the public domain or borrow one -- electronically -- that's not.....

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-morrison-brewster-kahle-20120128,0,4242619.column