If you’ve ever wanted to visit a website that doesn't exist anymore or watch television clips from years ago, your solution has arrived: the Internet Archive.
Founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, gave the 2017 Lucile Kelling Henderson Lecture, hosted by the UNC School of Information and Library Science on Friday. His talk outlined their goal of "Universal Access to All Knowledge." The Internet Archive has 460 billion web captures, 2.2 million films and videos, 2.5 million audio recordings, 140,000 live concerts, 8 million texts with 3 million digital books, 100,000 software programs and 3 million hours of television.
“It’s been a dream since the Library of Alexandria, and I think we can actually do it now," Kahle said. "We have the technologies to do it. We’ve got the political spirit to be in a free and open environment."
Kahle discussed how having access to everything is rare, and he isn’t sure how long it will last. In 2007, the FBI asked the Internet Archive for information on one of its users because of national security.
“So we sued the United States Government and we won,” Kahle said. “As a library, the idea of protecting our patrons’ reading habits is something that is very important to us. There’s a long history of bad things happening when people can get rounded up for things that they’ve read in libraries.”
Dean of the School of Information and Library Science, Gary Marchionini, wanted to bring the Internet Archive to campus because it is changing the way that people think about libraries. Additionally, Kahle has been a visiting professor at UNC and has been a pioneer in the field information science.
“As an information school you know we’re engaged in understanding how information is created and shared and used and managed, and so he’s kind of been one of the pioneers – it’s kind of a no-brainer,” Marchionini said.
First-year graduate student in the School of Information and Library Science, Spencer Bevis, recommends that undergraduates visit and use the Internet Archive.
“If they’re curious to see what Google looked like 10 years ago it’s great," Bevis said. "If they’re curious to see what free movies there are on there that they might like, there’s a lot of popular stuff that’s on there."
