Brewster Lurton Kahle ( ; born October 21, 1960) is an American digital librarian, computer engineer, and Internet entrepreneur. He graduated from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1982 with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in

computer science and engineering Computer science and engineering (CSE) is an academic subject comprising approaches of computer science and computer engineering. There is no clear division in computing between science and engineering, just like in the field of materials science ...

. Kahle founded the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

(including

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

) and co-founded

Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was a web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco, California. It was founded as an independent company by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat in 1996. Alexa provided web traffic data, global rankings, and other info ...

in 1996. He was inducted into the

Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet. Overview ...

in 2012.

Biography

Early life and education

Kahle was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

and raised in

Scarsdale, New York Scarsdale is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Westchester County, New York, United States. The Town of Scarsdale is coterminous municipality, coextensive with the Village of Scarsdale, but the community has opted to operate ...

, the son of Margaret Mary (Lurton) and Robert Vinton Kahle, a

mechanical engineer Mechanical may refer to: Machine * Machine (mechanical), a system of mechanisms that shape the actuator input to achieve a specific application of output forces and movement * Mechanical calculator, a device used to perform the basic operations o ...

. He went to Scarsdale High School. He graduated from the

in 1982, receiving a

degree with a major in

, where he was a member of Chi Phi fraternity. The emphasis of his studies was

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

; he studied under

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist, cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

and W. Daniel Hillis.

Career

After graduation, Kahle joined the

Thinking Machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuse ...

team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the

Connection Machine The Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation. The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann arch ...

, for six years (1983–1989). There, he and others developed the WAIS system, the first Internet distributed search and document retrieval system, a precursor to the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. In 1992, he co-founded, with Bruce Gilliat, WAIS, Inc. (sold to

AOL AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online ...

in 1995 for $15 million), and, in 1996,

(sold to

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

in 1999 for $250 million in stock). At the same time as he started Alexa, he founded the

, which he continues to direct. In 2001, he implemented the

, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996. Kahle was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices of Alta Vista, where he was struck by the immensity of the task being undertaken and achieved: to store and index everything that was on the Web. Kahle states: "I was standing there, looking at this machine that was the size of five or six Coke machines, and there was an 'aha moment' that said, 'You can do everything.' Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, run the Kahle/Austin Foundation. The Foundation supports the Free Software Foundation for its

GNU Project The GNU Project ( ) is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and Computer hardware, computing dev ...

, among other projects, with a total giving of about $4.5 million in 2011. In 2012, Kahle and banking veteran Jordan Modell established Internet Archive Federal Credit Union to serve people in New Brunswick, N.J. and

Highland Park, New Jersey Highland Park is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Middlesex County, New Jersey, Middlesex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, in the New York City metropolitan area. The borough is located on the northern banks of the Raritan River, in th ...

, as well as participants in programs that alleviate poverty in those areas. Following legal violations and a cease-and-desist from the

National Credit Union Administration The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) is an American government-backed insurer of Credit unions in the United States, credit unions in the United States, one of two agencies that provide deposit insurance to depositors in U.S. deposi ...

, the credit union was liquidated in December 2015.

Social reception

Kahle was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

(2010) for archiving, and making available, all forms of digital information. He is also a member of the

, a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

. Kahle serves on the boards of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

Public Knowledge Public Knowledge is an American non-profit organization, non-profit advocacy, public interest group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 2001 by David Bollier, Gigi Sohn, and Laurie Racine, Public Knowledge is primarily involved in the fields of ...

, the European Archive (now Internet memory) and the Television Archive. He is a member of the advisory board of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

, and is a member of the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure. In 2010, Kahle received an honorary doctorate from

Simmons University Simmons University (previously Simmons College) is a private university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1899 by clothing manufacturer John Simmons. In 2018, it reorganized its structure and changed its name to a ...

Career emphasis

Digitization advocacy

In 1997, Kahle explained that apart from the value for

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...

s' use of these digital archives, they might also help resolve some common infrastructure complaints about the Internet, such as adding reliability to "404 Document not found" errors, contextualizing information to make it more trustworthy, and maintaining navigation to aid in finding related content. Kahle also explained the importance of packaging enough meta-data (information about the information) into the archive, since it is unknown what future researchers will be interested in, and that it might be more problematic to find data than to preserve it. Kahle has been critical of

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

's book digitization, especially of Google's exclusivity in restricting other search engines' digital access to the books they archive. In a 2011 talk Kahle described Google's 'snippet' feature as a means of tiptoeing around

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

issues, and expressed his frustration with the lack of a decent lending system for digital materials. He said the digital transition has moved from local control to central control, non-profit to for-profit, diverse to homogeneous, and from "ruled by law" to "ruled by contract". Kahle stated that even

public-domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive ri ...

material published before 1923, and not bound by copyright law, is still bound by Google's contracts and requires permission to be distributed or copied. Kahle reasoned that this trend has emerged for a number of reasons: distribution of information favoring centralization, the economic cost of digitizing books, the issue of library staff without the technical knowledge to build these services, and the decision of administrators to

outsource Outsourcing is a business practice in which company, companies use external providers to carry out business processes that would otherwise be handled internally. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to ...

information services. Kahle advocated in 2009:

It's not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book
digital library A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...
available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple
Web search A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are typically ...
, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers—and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.

Physical media

Brewster Kahle - Lecture on the Internet Archive and Copyright 2025

"Knowledge lives in lots of different forms over time," Kahle said in 2011. "First it was in people's memories, then it was in

manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has ...

s, then

printed Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and Printmaking, images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabon ...

books, then

microfilm A microform is a scaled-down reproduction of a document, typically either photographic film or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the original d ...

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

s, now on the digital internet. Each one of these generations is very important." Voicing a strong reaction to the idea of books simply being thrown away, and inspired by the

Svalbard Global Seed Vault The Svalbard Global Seed Vault () is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds fro ...

, Kahle envisioned collecting one physical copy of every book ever published. "We're not going to get there, but that's our goal," he said. "We want to see books live forever." Pointing out that even digital books have a physical home on a hard drive somewhere, he sees saving the physical artifacts of information storage as a way to hedge against the uncertainty of the future. Alongside the books, Kahle plans to store the Internet Archive's old servers, which were replaced in 2010. Kahle began by having conventional

shipping container A shipping container is a container with strength suitable to withstand shipment, storage, and handling. Shipping containers range from large reusable steel boxes used for intermodal shipments to the ubiquitous corrugated box design, corrugated b ...

s modified as climate-controlled storage units. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. As of 2011, Kahle had gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse is large enough to hold about a million titles, with each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box,

pallet A pallet (also called a skid) is a flat transport structure, which supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift, a pallet jack, a Loader (equipment), front loader, a Jack (mechanical), jacking device, or an erect cra ...

and shipping container in which it resides. A given book may be retrieved in about an hour, not to be loaned out but to be used to verify contents recorded in another medium.

Book preservation The conservation and restoration of books, manuscripts, documents, and ephemera is an activity dedicated to extending the life of items of historical and personal value made primarily from paper, parchment, and leather. When applied to cultural ...

experts commented he will have to contend with

vermin Vermin (colloquially varmint(s) or varmit(s)) are pests or nuisance animals that spread diseases and destroy crops, livestock, and property. Since the term is defined in relation to human activities, which species are included vary by regi ...

and about a century's worth of books printed on wood pulp paper that disintegrates over time because of its own acidity. Peter Hanff, deputy director of

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library is the primary special-collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. ...

, said that just keeping the books on the west coast of the US will save them from the climate fluctuations that are the norm in other parts of the country. In 2024 Kahle shipped 350,000 (mainly European) dissertations from the stacks of

Leiden University Library Leiden University Libraries is the set of libraries of Leiden University, founded in 1575 in Leiden, Netherlands. A later edition entitled ''The bastion of liberty : a history of Leiden University'', was published in 2018. Full-text at archive ...

to storage of the Internet Archive in Pennsylvania. These dissertations, from the period 1850-1990, were deselected by the Leiden Library.

Blogging on current affairs

Kahle maintains a

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

, described as "Thoughts about Housing, Education, Food and Health in the United States".

Awards and appointments

*2004: Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) *2005: American Academy of Arts and Sciences *Library of Congress NDIIP advisory board *NSF Cyber Infrastructure advisory board *2007: Knowledge Trust Honors award recipient *2008
Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award
from the University of Illinois *Public Knowledge, IP3 award recipient *2009: "50 Visionaries Changing Your World",

Utne Reader ''Utne Reader'' (also known as ''Utne''; , ) is a digital digest that collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment, generally from alternative media sources including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music, and ...

*2010: National Academy of Engineering *2010: Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Alberta *2010: Zoia Horn Intellectual Freedom Award *2012: Software and Information Industry of America Peter Jackson Awar
SIIA Peter Jackson Award
*2012: Inducted into the

*2013: LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology * 2016: Fellowship of the Digital Preservation Coalition * 2024: Kahle received the Lifetime Achievement in Building Internet Infrastructure Award from the Internet Infrastructure Coalition.

References

External links

Brewster.Kahle.org
His personal blog * *
Biography
at The Internet Archive *
Search result of items created by Brewster Kahle
at the Internet Archive * * * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kahle, Brewster 1960 births Access to Knowledge activists American computer businesspeople American Internet celebrities American technology company founders Articles containing video clips Businesspeople from San Francisco American information technology businesspeople Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Intellectual property activism Digital archivists Living people MIT School of Engineering alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering People from Scarsdale, New York Philanthropists from New York (state) Scarsdale High School alumni Thinking Machines Corporation American free speech activists