Internet Archive

A former Christian Science Church in San Francisco houses the Internet Archive. The sturdy classical architecture—appropriate for an edifice that is at once a temple of knowledge, a library, and data vault— contains a greater volume of information than the Library of Congress, all of it kept on a modest array of drives.

Robert Miller, Director of Books, stands next to a petabyte of data (1 million gigabytes), storing a fraction of Archive.org, Wayback Machine, Prelinger Film Archive and Open Library, with mirrors of the collection at Bibliotheca Alexandria, Egypt and nearby in Mountain View, California. This collection represents the foundation of Brewster Kahle’s vision to build the Library of Alexandria version 2.0, providing everyone everywhere access to all the world’s knowledge, including books, movies, music and websites.

An activity monitor displays a real time tapestry of URLs as web crawlers-also known as spiders-continuously index snapshots on an endless traverse of the World Wide Web.

Borges’ Library of Babel comes to mind. 

 
 
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