Libraries at Risk: Brewster Kahle on Ownership, Access, and Control

Brewster Kahle
Founder, Digital Librarian
Internet Archive

Graphic: Libraries at Risk: Brewster Kahle on Ownership, Access, and Control

Graphic: What threats are reshaping library access and control?

Brewster Kahle: We've now had cyberattacks on the Internet Archive. We've also had Seattle Public down, they were down for months. Toronto Public, Hamilton, Calgary Public, British Library suffered a ransomware attack, and now we have all sorts of other attacks on libraries. The book bannings, the criminalization of librarianship, the structural problems of licenses that are making it so that libraries don't own anything anymore, are making it so that our jobs are much harder, and I think we should now figure out what to do.

Graphic: What happens when libraries no longer own their collections?

There's a tragic evolution of the internet. It offered the opportunity for universal access to all knowledge, that we could take the published works of humankind and make them available to anybody that wants to have access to it. With payments, there's enough money for all of this. Our libraries are turning into a Netflix of books, that these materials can blink on and offline all the time. The publishers can go and change what the written record is in all libraries, all at once. This makes no sense. This violates the basic structure of what libraries do, in terms of collecting, preserving, lending, and then interoperating with other libraries. We've ended up not owning anything. Anything. That is an enormous problem. It means that we're dependent on others that we don't control, and we're not doing some parts of our base job.

Graphic: What can libraries do to take back control?

If you take all of the books, the 8,000,000 books that the Internet Archive has digitized over the years, and all of the periodicals, 5,000,000 issues, which is larger than most libraries in the United States. If you just took the text, not the images, but the text, it would fit on a thumb drive this size. That means that you could actually serve all of that on a Mac Mini that cost $1,500. So, we have a turning point where we actually don't need the mainframe structures of times gone by to be able to own/operate our own collections.

But do we need the tools to get a lot better? Yes. We need to change the structure, such that we own and control our own infrastructure, and then make copies so that if you get hit with a ransomware and they encrypt your stuff, you may be back a week or something like that, but you can go and restore. This isn't that hard if we took it seriously. Now is a time that I think people realize that we need to keep copies. We need to have libraries that have actual collections. So, let's go and have the technical expertise in-house, in our libraries.

Graphic: EDUCAUSE Review (splash screen)