MercuryNews.com | 08/11/2004 | Internet archivist has modest goal: Store everything

MercuryNews.com | 08/11/2004 | Internet archivist has modest goal: Store everything Internet archivist has modest goal: Store everything By Matt Marshall Mercury News Brewster Kahle, founder of San Francisco's Internet Archive, burns with a mission. He wants to ensure universal access to all human knowledge. And now he thinks that goal is within our grasp. The emergence of cheap data storage technology has made what once seemed a pipe dream distinctly possible -- digitizing and storing the entire Web, the world's 100 million books, 2 or 3 million audio recordings and millions more software programs, TV shows and videos. ``Storing this is a no-brainer,'' Kahle said. He's making what has been digitalized so far freely accessible at www.archive.org. And he's built an ``Internet Bookmobile,'' a van that drives around the country downloading public-domain books from the archive via a satellite Net link. The van recently got kicked out of Walden Pond in Massachusetts for giving away Henry David Thoreau books and upsetting local book merchants. He has also taken the Bookmobile to places that really need it -- Uganda, Egypt, India -- printing out books for children at $1 a piece. And then there's the archive's newer offings -- 15,000 music concerts and 300 feature films.