The Internet Archive, Trying to Encompass All Creation - NYTimes.com

"Brewster Kahle is a librarian by training and temperament. In the mid-1990s, when many saw the nascent World Wide Web as a place to sell things, he saw it as data that cried out to be preserved and cataloged. Later, he widened his scope to include material — film, books, music — that was not native to the web but could be digitally gathered there. By most standards, Mr. Kahle has been pretty successful. The Internet Archive serves from two to three million visitors a day with such tools as the Wayback Machine, which provides snapshots of 435 billion Web pages saved over time. The archive has seven million texts (you could call them books), 2.1 million audio recordings, and 1.8 million videos. It is an immense library. Mr. Kahle has even bigger dreams, however. With a limited staff, the archive can conserve only so much. But if anyone can become a curator, the archive may one day resemble one of those Borgesian fantasies of the Total Library, a place that not only collects the world but becomes it ..."