TEDTalk: Brewster Kahle

2. Watch the TEDTalk video: “Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library” and post your thoughts on your blog.

So here we are in module 10 and I’m as agreeable with the TEDTalks as I was in module 1. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising because these TEDTalks were chosen because they are good examples of increasing access but I sometimes wish I could find more to disagree with so my posts might seem more interesting.

I didn’t know the name Brewster Kahle but I was completely engaged in what he was saying. I was very surprised to find out (over 17 minutes in) that he was talking about the Internet Archive. I’ve known of Internet Archive for many years and have used it regularly over the years but I only used the Wayback Machine and never noticed that they also archive texts, video, and audio! As a consumer, I am most interested in the texts and then video and finally audio. As an aspiring information professional, I’m so glad to see that this project has continued from the time of the TEDTalk filmed in 2007.

I hope that Kahle’s project will reach its goal someday of making all of the books in the Library of Congress available in digital format and that interested parties can figure out ways to make profits and secure the rights of the creators. It is interesting to note that even back in 2007, Kahle said that the technology already existed to complete the project, but it only lacked money to pay for the scanning overhead and a model in which people split money.

Not mentioned in the TEDTalk is Kahle’s opposition to Google Book. I have been generally supportive of Google Book because it seemed like the best chance to have all books scanned and made publically available and because it has been useful to me many times in the past few years. It has made me expand my thinking about mass digitization and which organizations might represent the best interests of humanity. The following paragraph is from Kahle’s page on Wikipedia and it is originally found here (original source video embedded below):

Kahle has been critical of Google's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines digital access to the books they archive. Kahle describes Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tip-toeing around copyright issues, and further expresses his frustration in the lack of a decent loaning system for digital materials. He states the digital transition, thus far, has gone from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract". Kahle states that even public-domain material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, is still bound by contracts and requires a permission-based system from Google to be distributed or copied. Kahle reasons that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of staffing at libraries not having the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of the administrators to outsource information services.

Kahle is a wonderfully engaging speaker and I love the fact that he talks like a librarian and seems to have the larger mission of the library in mind as he tries to accomplish his organization’s goals.