Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, will speak at the annual Graduate Center Friends of the Library event April 20, 2015. [A recording of the event is here.]

Kahle (pronounced “Kale”) is a leader of digital stewardship for the world’s heritage. He founded the Internet Archive in 1996 to strive for “universal access to all knowledge.” The Internet Archive preserves vintage software, moving images, sound, and text. It is best known as THE public archive of internet, approaching 500 billion web pages archived for public access. The IA’s Wayback Machine automatically crawls the web again and again to preserve web pages, one snapshot after another, over a long time line. 

The Graduate Center Library subscribes to the IA’s Archive-It service to preserve the web sites we want it to, on command. We use it to preserve web-based graduate work at the very point of graduation; to create a reliable record of the work a GC grad submitted to earn a degree.

What the GC’s archived web site looks like on the Wayback Machine.

Join us April 20, 1 – 2.30, in the Graduate Center’s 9th floor Skylight room.
to reserve your spot. To learn more about Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, see Jill Lepore’s article in the January 26 New Yorker magazine

Since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Kahle invented the Internet’s first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company that was sold to America Online in 1995. In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive which may be the largest digital library. At the same time, he co-founded Alexa Internet which helps catalog the Web in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.

Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with W. Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. In 1983, Kahle helped start Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as a lead engineer for six years. He serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive.