Building the Ecology of Libraries – An Interview with Brewster Kahle

“At OKCon 2011, we had the opportunity to interview Brewster Kahle who is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian. He is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge”. Besides the widely known “Wayback Machine“, where archived copies of most webpages can be accessed, the Internet Archive is very active in the digitization of books, as well, and provides with the “Open Library” a free catalog that aims to describe “every book ever published”. Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, created the Kahle/Austin Foundation that supports the Internet Archive and other non-profit organizations. As open data enthusiasts from the library world, we were especially interested in how the activities of the Internet Archive relate to libraries. We wanted to know how its general approach and service could be useful for libraries in Europe.” Use the link above to access the full transcript of the interview during which Kahle provides answers to the following questions: “[1] What is the internet archive and what is your vision for its future? [2] What are the obstacles preventing this happening in the moment? [3] What are the challenges faced by the Internet Archive regarding the digitization of books? [4] You already talked about cooperating with traditional libraries with in-copyright books. How is the cooperation between the Internet Archive – which itself seems to be a library – and traditional libraries in other fields, with respect to the digitization of public domain books for instance? [5] Are there already cooperations between European libraries and the Internet Archive, and are scanners already located in Europe which could be used for digitization projects in university or national libraries? [6] A very important topic is also the digitization of very old materials, valuable materials, old prints, handwritten manuscripts and so on. How do you also deal with these materials? [7] How do you integrate all these digitized objects and how do you deal with the specific formats that are used to represent and consume digital materials? [8] So there’s the Internet Archive and the Open Library. Can you make the distinction any clearer for those that don’t currently understand it? [9] You mentioned Google Books. There are agreements between libraries and Google for digitizing materials. What are the benefits for libraries of choosing the Internet Archive over Google Books? [10] Is Google reusing Internet Archive books in Google Books? [11] People at OKCon naturally are supporters of Open Content, Open Knowledge but many libraries don’t like their digitized material to be open. Even public domain books which are digitized are normally kept on the libraries’ websites and by contracts or even by copyfraud they say: “You can not do whatever you want with this.” What would you say to libraries to really open up their digitized content? [12] Do all the libraries provide high resoultion [sic] scans or do some choose to only provide PDFs? [13] To be more concrete. For libraries that are thinking about digitizing their own collections: what exactly do you offer? [14] Ok. So that means you offer the scanner technology for free, you offer the knowledge about how to use it for free. Only these additional costs for transportation have to be taken by the libraries. With your experience in digitization projects, every library should – and can – contact you and you explain the process to the people, you say what you’re doing, you give your opinion on how you would do it and then, of course, the library can decide? [15] Have you ever tried a kind of crowdsourcing approach for library users to digitize books themselves, placing a scanner in the library and let the users do it. Or does it take to much education for handling the scanners? [16] Does the Internet Archive collaborate with Europeana in some way, for example for making material from the Internet Archive available in Europeana? [17] You just mentioned the metadata. So everything that you have, not only the digitized versions of the books but also the enrichments, the metadata about it, the OCR result, for example, everything is free and open. So, if I would like to, I could take the whole stuff and put it on my own server, re-publish it in the way that I want? [18] The MARC records you mentioned, they are of course also available. So it makes sense for a library to include not only their own books but every book in the Internet Archive in their own catalog. Because, in fact, it is available to all the patrons. So, you could think of it as a possession of every library in the world. Is that right?”