Meet The Man Building The World's Biggest Library

His name is Brewster Kahle. He's a dotcom multimillionaire who's working on what he calls Alexandria 2.0, aka the Internet Archive. Among other things, you can use its Wayback Machine to see what the web or a website looked like at a previous time.

Wired.com wrote a lengthy portrait of Kahle last week:

Operating out of a palatial old Christian Science church in San Francisco’s Richmond district, the Internet Archive is the web’s most extensive library. It draws funding both from donations and from traditional libraries that pay to have their collections digitized by Archive workers, who carefully turn each page of a book for the scanners.

...“I’m a digital librarian,” says Kahle, “which seems a little retro for somebody who started companies, and who lives in the Bay Area, and does high tech and designs supercomputers. But I think that some of the roles and traditions that evolved before the electronic stuff make a lot of sense. Like publishers that sell books, libraries that buy books, libraries that lend books.”

According to Wired, Kahle's goal is to collect one copy of every book ever written. So far he has reportedly amassed about 500,000.

No information is too obscure — Kahle just got back from Bali, where he helped digitize everything ever written in Balinese. And nothing is wasted — every physical book that is digitized is sent across the San Francisco Bay to Richmond, where it’s added to one of many climate-controlled shipping containers.