The Internet Archive's Physical Archive: A New Project Playground?
By David Rapp Jun 16, 2011The founder of the Internet Archive (IA), Brewster Kahle, recently announced via a blog post that IA had officially launched what Kahle called "the Physical Archive of the Internet Archive." It's a new direction for the digitization-centered IA, and, as Kahle told LJ, it could provide an opportunity for forward-thinking researchers.
The Physical Archive became necessary, Kahle said, because IA had found that it was starting to accumulate books from its digitization initiatives, such as its project to make one million works available to blind and dyslexic people via the DAISY talking-book format, or its Open Library ebook lending project. (This contrasted with previous digitization projects, in which most of the books scanned by IA were provided by libraries, which then retrieved their books.)
As IA began to own more and more books, it opted not to destroy them or disperse them widely through donation. Instead, it is now storing and preserving them in a centralized state-of-the-art warehouse facility—and soliciting donations for more books, in a long-term quest to obtain "one copy of everything ever published," according to Kahle. There are currently about 450,000 items stored there.
"We're in a period of transition, and people are throwing out books," he told LJ. "I think we should get good at saving them."
Building a "world-class" collection
The Physical Archive has been two years in the making, as IA tested various prototype storage methods, and development of storage methods will be ongoing as the collection gets larger.
The new storage center, based in Richmond, CA, just north of IA's home base of San Francisco, contains modified shipping containers for storing books, each moisture and temperature controlled (50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and 30 percent relative humidity). All books are cataloged, and ISBN, LCCN, and OCLC identifying numbers are used to guard against storing duplicate works.
The Richmond facility alone, according to Kahle, can hold approximately 3 million books. Once a physical archive of about 10 million books is collected, he said, the archive would meet its initial goal, and be "a world-class library collection," with a quantity of books on a par with Boston Public Library's (8.9 million books, CDs, and DVDs) or Yale University Library's (13 million volumes).
Though Richmond is in the middle of an earthquake zone, Kahle believes that books would be protected by the shipping containers in event of a natural disaster. "These things could be dropped from a building and they wouldn't be hurt," he said.
He said that the project is currently looking for more large donations of books as well as music and video works—and is willing to pay for shipping the materials to the storage facility.
The project is currently funded solely by the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which is run by Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin. Kahle said that he has discussed the project with outside foundations as well, and he hopes more will get involved once the project is more established.
New uses for 100,000 books?
What will IA do with all those books in shipping containers? Kahle didn't spell out any specific plans, other than to make them available to others with original ideas.
When the Internet Archive began the Million Books project in 2002, he told LJ, they went looking for a set of 100,000 books they would have permission to nondestructively scan, and found it difficult to find takers. But IA's new Physical Archive, Kahle said, will be open to new and different ideas.
"I'm hoping that there are people who will come and say, 'I've got a new use for 100,000 books,'" said Kahle—such as testing new digitization technologies, or putting together a study on how physical books degrade over time. "This is the sort of access that you probably wouldn't be allowed in other collections," he said.
