– A music radio station holds about 10,000 LP’s and CD’s or about 5 terabytes of uncompressed data.
– The Library of Congress contain about 20 million volumes, or about 20 terabytes text if typed into a computer.
– A semester of classroom lectures of a small college is about 18 terabytes of compressed data.
Therefore the continued reduction in price of data storage, and data we offer also data transmission, could lead to interesting applications as all the text of a library, music of a radio station, and video of a video store become cost effective to store and later transmitted in digital form.
In the end, our goal is to help people answer hard questions. Not “what is my bank balance?”, or “where can I buy the cheapest shoes”, or “where is my friend Bill?” – these will be answered by smaller commercial services. Rather, answer the hard questions like: “Should I go back to graduate school?” or “How should I raise my children?” or “What book should I read next?”. Questions such as these can be informed by the experiences of others. Can machines and digital libraries really help in answering such questions? In the long term, we believe yes, but perhaps in new ways which would have importance in education and day-to-day life.
Further Reading:
Preserving Digital Objects: Recurrent Needs and Challenges, December 1995 presentation at 2nd NPO conference on Multimedia Preservation, Brisbane, Australia.
The Vanished Library, Luciano Canfora. University of Berkeley Press, 1990.
Biography:
Brewster Kahle is a founder of the Internet Archive in April 1996. Before that, he was the inventor of the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) system in 1989 and founded WAIS Inc in 1992. WAIS helped bring commercial and government agencies onto the Internet by selling Internet publishing tools and production services to companies such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, New York Times, and the Government Printing Office.
Schooled at MIT (BSEE ’82), Brewster designed super computers in the 80’s at Thinking Machines Corporation.
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From India to the World: A Scholar’s Tribute to the Internet Archive
Posted on August 29, 2025 by Chris Freeland
Every day, people around the world use the Internet Archive to learn, research, and discover. Aadarsh Pathak, a scholar in India, called the Internet Archive “a guardian of our collective digital heritage” in a recent note. His words inspire us—and we’d love to hear yours as we celebrate 1 trillion web pages archived.
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University
I am writing to you as a research scholar to express my profound gratitude for your visionary creation, the Internet Archive. It is not merely a digital library; for academics like myself, it is an indispensable and unparalleled resource.