Lunch at the Internet Archive

I was meeting with a friend last Friday, who suggested I join him for the Friday lunch hosted by the Internet Archive, in its office located in the Presidio (in SF). The Archive is led by Brewster Kahle, who founded Alexa Internet and sold it to Amazon.com. The mission he has set for himself is to digitalize the world's media and store it for next generations to enjoy and benefit from. I had met Brewster Kahle a couple of times at conferences, and found his project absolutely fascinating. There is actually a great podcast on ITConversations where he explains it all.
The Archive is also involved in providing free storage and free bandwidth to OurMedia, the multimedia sharing non-profit organization spearheaded by Marc Canter and JD Lasica.

The lunch was really open to anyone showing up, and started with Brewster going around the table and asking everyone to introduce themselves, and explain what they were doing and why they were here. There were a few guys coming for interviews to join the Web development team. People then splitted in smaller groups to discuss on different topics.

Next to the meeting room was this custom made book scanner, and I chatted with the guy who had developed the software to automate the process. This machine is used to take a picture of both pages of a book whilst keeping it open flat. They can be barely seen, but there are two hi-res digital camera attached on both sides of the machine. This is linked to a computer that uploads pictures of pages, applies OCR and adds them to the archive.

On the adjacent wall is standing up open a gigantic book, as a matter of fact, it is the World's Biggest Book, which is 6.7 x 5 feet and weighs 172 pounds. Most impressive, even though this picture does not really provide the perspective. According to this article:

The 60.3 kilogram book about Bhutan (a country in South-Eastern Asia) has been recognized the biggest book in the world.
Writing it took 4 liters of ink and the amount of paper enough to cover a football field. The author of the giant book is professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Michael Holey.

Every copy of the book "Bhutan: Odyssey around the Kingdom" is 213.3 centimeters long by 152.3 centimeters broad, has 112 pages and costs about two thousand dollars. Holey is going to donate a part of the sum he will earn selling the book -10 thousand dollars to the charity foundation he established. The foundation builds schools in Cambodia and Bhutan. According to the Associated Press, the new book has already been enlisted in Guinness Book of Records.
Holey arranged many expeditions of students of the Institute to Cambodia and Bhutan - an isolated country with population of 700 thousand people. Then he decided to publish the photos he made in Bhutan to earn money for building schools there.

At first the professor did not plan to publish the biggest book in the world, but in a course of work on its colorful pictures he realized how exciting big photos of Bhutan"s nature and life are. Everything there is unusual, even rice is of red color.
According to those who saw the book you meet it like a person, face to face. Bookbinders had to invent a special mode of binding the book because of its enormous size.

As I was walking out, I saw the Internet Bookmobile, the van that carries a full printing equipment and Internet satellite connectivity. It is mentioned in the podcast I referred to, as well as in this detailed piece.

I am not sure if the lunch takes place every Friday, but it was certainly interesting to spend some time with these folks. And if you have never tried it, the WayBack machine (on the Archive's home page) allows one to see how a web site looked almost ten years ago. For example, here is Reuters.com as of Nov 13, 1996.

Comments

[JD Lasica]

Yes, they do it every Friday. It's an amazing gathering, no?