Universal Access to All Knowledge
Towards Universal Access to All Knowledge – Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public web page ever created, and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By mostly using existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this as well as compensate authors within the current worldwide library budget. Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world.
Thomas Jefferson’s statement that “All that is necessary for a student is access to a library” may be an exaggeration, but access to information is a key ingredient to education and an open society.
Will we allow ourselves to re-invent our concept of libraries to expand and to use the new technologies? This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our governments’ spending priorities, and in law.
by Brewster Kahle on July 1st, at 15:00 in Track I
Brewster Kahle is a passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: making information free and accessible through digital means.
While a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Kahle studied artificial intelligence. Soon after graduating, he helped found the company Thinking Machines, a supercomputer maker. In 1989, Mr. Kahle created the Internet’s first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and established WAIS, Inc. With The Wall Street Journal as its first customer, the company revolutionized the electronic publishing market and Mr. Kahle eventually sold the company to America Online. In 1996, Mr. Kahle founded the Internet Archive, the largest digital archive in the world. With a staff of nearly 300, and 100 partnering libraries, the organization is working to create an online catalog of every book ever created. Also, in 1996 Mr. Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, a service that collects data on web browsing behavior for future analysis, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.
Mr. Kahle received a B.S. in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Mary Austin started The Kahle/Austin Foundation, which supports the Internet Archive along with other non-profit organizations with similar goals. Additionally, Mr. Kahle is the founder of Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts.
Mr. Kahle is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive. Mr. Kahle is an advisory board member of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the Library of Congress’s, and is a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure. Mr. Kahle is the recipient of the 2004 IP3 Award from Public Knowledge , 2009 Free Software Foundation Award and the Paul Evan Peters Award, which is offered jointly from the Coalition of Networked Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE. In 2009, Mr. Kahle was named by Utne Reader as one of the “50 Visionaries Changing Your World.”
Rufus Pollock
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[...] people living in the digital society – it´s rather avant-garde. At OKCon visionaries (like Brewster Kahle) meet and discuss how internet will/should transform society within the next few years towards an [...]