Internet Archive is widening its focus

Brewster Kahle is a librarian by training and temperament. In the mid-1990s, when many saw the nascent World Wide Web as a place to sell things, he saw it as data that cried out to be preserved and catalogued.

Later, he widened his scope to include material — film, books, music — that was not native to the web but could be digitally gathered there.

By most standards, Kahle has been pretty successful.

The Internet Archive serves from two to three million visitors a day with such tools as the Wayback Machine, which provides snapshots of 435 billion Web pages saved over time.

The archive has seven million texts (you could call them books), 2.1 million audio recordings, and 1.8 million videos. It is an immense library.

Kahle has even bigger dreams, however. With a limited staff, the archive can conserve only so much.

But if anyone can become a curator, the archive may one day resemble one of those Borgesian fantasies of the Total Library, a place that not only collects the world but becomes it.

“We thought the machines were going to save us — crawling the web, digitising the books, organising the information — but we were wrong,” Kahle said.

“Communities of people are at the heart of curation.”

At a recent event at the converted San Francisco church that serves as the archive’s headquarters, the nonprofit’s staff showed off exactly how it and communities are going to be “building libraries together,” as the catchphrase of the evening had it.

An ample crowd was in attendance showing the high interest in the esoteric event.

A new book scanner was presented; Robert Miller, the archive’s director of books, literally unveiled it.

This baby was only 40 inches tall and 62 pounds, versus the earlier version’s six feet and 350 pounds.

In other words, it is portable, and can be taken to collections that are too fragile or cumbersome to make their own way to the archive. It’s much easier to use, too.

Television is getting increasing emphasis at the archive, with hundreds of thousands of news reports that are searchable.

Now, it is focusing on political ads as well.

Roger Macdonald, director of the Television Archive, introduced the Philly Political Media Watch Project, a pilot program by the archive and partner institutions.

The notion here is that political ads fly by on television, giving the viewer little context in which to judge them.

Like the ad shown to the archive crowd where a Philadelphia candidate accused his opponent of burning down a church.

Trumped-up charge or heinous act? No one had a clue.

The project is experimenting with creating a resource library of political ads and the TV news broadcasts in which they appeared.

The goal is to help journalists and researchers compare the ads from a single sponsor or group, see who is paying for them and, ultimately, try to determine how well the local news media are covering the issues behind the ads.

If the pilot works out in Philadelphia, it will unroll nationally in time for the 2016 elections.

“This is a modest step to providing individual citizens with the information they need,” Macdonald said.

A third area of focus is music, which is expanding on previous efforts.

In a throwback of sorts to an earlier era, a prototype listening room has been set up at the archive for physical patrons.

“Preserving music is now urgent as tapes are disintegrating, disc formats are used less, and new web-only music has blossomed,” Kahle said.

“We are now working with top archives, collectors and labels to preserve our treasures.” Among them: the ARChive of Contemporary Music and Musica Omnia, a label specialising in classical music.

Yet another new archive effort involves the website. The existing site “kind of looks like it’s a 10-year-old website, because it’s a 10-year-old website,” Kahle explained.

A new site is in beta. It prominently encourages users to use the site to assemble their own virtual libraries of material, which they can return to when they want to hear, for instance, Cuban jazz from the 1940s or read “Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas.”

“It turns out people want old stuff, which I think is a good thing,” Kahle said.