Libraries at Risk: Borrowed Infrastructure and Institutional Resilience

Gerry Bayne: Welcome to the CNI Interviews podcast. I'm Gerry Bayne for EDUCAUSE, and I'm highlighting conversations from the Coalition for Networked Information 2025 spring meeting. The CNI meeting is a venue for technology leaders in higher education, library administration, digital publishing, and research to share and broaden their knowledge of digital information issues. On this episode, we're speaking with Brewster Kahle, MIT trained computer engineer, digital librarian, and most notably, founder of the internet archive, a nonprofit digital library that actively preserves and provides access to billions of web pages, millions of books, audio, video, and software in pursuit of its mission, universal access to all knowledge. Before founding the archive, Brewster spent the early 1990s helping to shape the emerging web. He co-founded Alexa internet in 1996 and sold that technology a few years later. Also, in 1996, he launched the internet archive, one of the largest and most trusted stewards of digital record. In 2001, he introduced the Wayback Machine, a tool that lets anyone rewind the web and browse archived versions of websites going back decades. In this conversation, he reflects on how growing corporate control cyber risks and licensing models threaten that vision and why libraries need to reclaim ownership of infrastructure and collections. I started off by asking what are the most urgent structural threats to libraries?

Brewster Kahle: So we've now had cyber-attacks on the internet. Archive brought us down for three days from crawling, five days of the way back machine. We were offline and a week before other things, so that was a hit. But 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. Of course, 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 that it's not just like, oh, there's a one-off over there. We have to figure out what to do, and I think lots of copies keep stuff safe. Going and controlling your own infrastructure makes it so that you're less at the behest of somebody else.

Brewster Kahle: If we're here to protect our collections, our services, and our patrons, what happens when? Well, we've shuttle our patrons off to other people's database products and they can be spied on and packaged and sold to people that we may not know. So the good thing about this is actually the technology has gotten to be relatively easy to actually own control and lend out your own materials. It's kind of surprising, but if you take all of the books, the 8 million books that the internet archive is digitized over the years and all of the periodicals, 5 million issues, which is, this 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 costs $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. So would I recommend that for everybody? Yeah, probably. But do we need the tools to get a lot better? Yes, and we need to change the structure such that we own and control our own infrastructure. Then make copies, have buddies go and make copies of other places 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 from offsite copies. This isn't that hard if we took it seriously.

Gerry Bayne: Can you talk a little bit about the culture of non-ownership? I don't know if that's the right term to use. What we were referring to earlier. It seems like the culture of non-ownership is sort of the predominant mindset these days. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Brewster Kahle: Yeah. 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. But this whole slip into the license only world, I think kind of snuck up on a lot of librarians because they thought the print was the primary and these sort of digital things are kind of hard. We didn't have the skills for 'em, took mainframes, but most of that has all changed. Going and managing in a bunch of UBS or PDFs, it's just not that hard anymore. But we've ended up not owning anything, anything, and 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. We always say, well, we focus on access, but preservation is also a key component.

Gerry Bayne: Do you have any thoughts around this? I know you've sort of touched on this, but is there a fear that we're actually becoming less knowledgeable? The more expansive the internet gets?

Brewster Kahle: 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, and with payments, there's enough money for all of this and to get authors paid and the like, but it hasn't really happened. The question is why, and it's these very concentrated positions of power that we've made into platforms, publisher platforms that have made it so that we aren't building on the shoulders of giants. In fact, this generation, anybody under the age of 40 is basically brought up on what it is they've seen on screens. And yes, Wikipedia is kind of awesome, but it's thin. It needs more. We need all of the rest of it, and it's not there. And we're starting to have people confused about very basic things like, did the Holocaust happen?

Brewster Kahle: What's the history of the 20th century? Because the publishers have made sure it's not available to this generation only to those through database products that they don't, large part people don't use. So we have taken the great opportunity and shortchanged a generation such that they don't even have a library system that's as good as the one that I grew up with. If you want access to quick things, you can do that much more rapidly than when I was growing up, but the library system has been decapitated, so we need the library system to inform everyone, and there's enough money to do this. Yet we're structurally playing into a game that has very few winners. We want a game with many winners. We want to have lots of authors and some of which are paid, some of which are academic or whatever, and they just want to be read fine.

Brewster Kahle: We want lots of publishers, small publishers being able to make money out there. We want lots of libraries going and supporting local communities, local newspapers, local things, as well as the broad range of materials. We want an interlibrary loan system that is fervent. We love lots of booksellers. We're not getting any of that out of this generation, and some of it's the lack of antitrust enforcement that has come into place since the 1980s when we started this whole internet project, but it's more than that. It's libraries playing into and funding and fueling these large scale aggregators. So even the Haiti trusts, the J stores, the nonprofit OCLC, we have these lock-in problems, these sort of, oh, it's all licensed by me. It doesn't need to work that way. And we could have good maintenance of all of these organizations and the publishing structures in a much more decentralized way that would serve the general populace as well as these particular populations served by the libraries. It is tragic and it's bringing our civic infrastructure to a standstill. We have disputes about things we shouldn't be having disputes on. It's large part I'd suggest because we've locked up our materials and not made them very available.

Gerry Bayne: Is there any hope, is there anything you see on the horizon that is working towards solutions to these things? I think

Brewster Kahle: We can. We are seeing some smaller publishers see that they're not going to win by playing the monopoly games of the big platforms. Usually when people talk about platforms, they think about Facebook and Twitter. Yes, those are large publishing enterprises, but so is the hoopla, the overdrive, the science directs. These platforms push out the smaller players because they have to play by somebody else's games. So I think we need to buy directly. We need small publishers that are supported by libraries. Libraries have the budget still. Yes, we're getting defunded. Yes, we have book bans. Yes, we have criminalization of librarianship. Yes, there's real problems. IMLS just went down, but we still are supported by citizens. Let's go and build independent publishers, independent authors that will sell their works to libraries. That is the hope for the future. Let's go and stand tough. When libraries stand up for their rights, like when you see went and stood up to major academic publishers to go and make sure they have things.

Brewster Kahle: What did all the rest of the libraries do? They mostly just stood on the sidelines and cheered. It's like, yeah, how can we become all participants in a movement to make it so that we have a library system with a game with many winners that we end up with informed citizenry education system that works additions without being able to be changed underneath our grasp. That's what it's going to take, and that's what the internet archive is trying to help make happen through book server, through control digital lending, through other approaches that are actually finding homes, say, within the European law structure where in the United States is turning its back on libraries.

Gerry Bayne: Is there anything else you want to talk about that we haven't touched on?

Brewster Kahle: think every librarian and every citizen should know that libraries are under attack, and it's not just isolated things against, say, the internet archive or others. It's overall, and we need to stand tough, strong, spend our budgets differently and form our people differently. Go. 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. Again, it's not very hard. It can all run on an IBM pc, a single one to be able to serve a community of thousands, tens of thousands of people. So we have an opportunity not to turn time back, but to remember how the publishing structure worked. Publishers would make things, they'd sell them. They would go to individuals and they'd go to libraries, and those libraries kept them available, and they also worked with other libraries through inter-library loan, the magic system of the internet of the library system. Let's go and make that healthy, strong, robust.

Gerry Bayne: Great. Bruce Kahle, thank you so much for your time.

Brewster Kahle: Thank you. Great.