05 December 2011

Universal access to all knowledge

You've got to love the "Can Do" approach of the Internet Archives, as evident in this brief summary of a talk given on 20 November by Brewster Kahle

.... the Wayback Machine copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its six-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second.
Contrast that with the "can't do" attitude here.
 "Exponential growth of information means that we cannot capture and preserve all of it"

1 comment:

Ellen Thorne Morris said...

Archives and libraries are to my mind two separate functions. A library contains information available to the public, which can borrow or copy it at a moderate cost.
An archive is a business or government repository, a safe environment for storage of information in any format necessary for the function of business or government. Both business and government records may be released for public use with moderate costs to offset the hiring of staff to serve the public. My answer is to hire hundreds of librarians to work in archives and tech staff to copy or digitize records for public use.