Confessions of a Mad Librarian

ACM Queue's current issue includes "A Conversation with Brewster Kahle" by IBM VP Stu Feldman.

I'm still making my way through it, but the interview starts off with a bang:

STUART FELDMAN: How is it that you ended up in this most amazing role as the digital librarian of the Internet Archive? You had a string of obvious successes, making a major mark on a number of companies. Then you made this interesting apparent left turn into running a unique nonprofit specialized service.

BREWSTER KAHLE: This is all part of one theme that was floating in the air when I was in college: to build a digital library. The thing that gets me springing out of bed in the morning and has for the last 20 years is the idea that we could have universal access to all knowledge.

and from further down into the article:

BK: A 100-page black-and-white book with current toner and paper costs in the United States is $1, not figuring labor costs, rights costs, or depreciation of capital. That's an interesting number, because at a buck a book, it turns out that for a library, it could be less expensive to give books away than to loan them. In his book, Practical Digital Libraries, Michael Lesk reported that it cost Harvard incrementally $2 to loan a book out and bring it back and put it on the shelf. This is not figuring in the warehousing costs and all the building costs. This is just the incremental cost of loaning a book out.

Even if you put some fee in for the author, it looks cost effective to print and bind many books locally.

There are a lot more interesting tidbits ... some provocative, some mildly interesting. And I'm sure there's something for everyone to disagree with and maybe something for everyone to agree with.

And as a last quote:

We have found that preserving older packaged software is more difficult because they used copy protection for a time, but that had largely disappeared in the late 1980s. This may serve as an interesting historical note, given all the current work on copy protection, or DRM [digital rights management], for movies and music. The software industry could not get DRM to work for itself; why does the movie and music industry think the software industry can make it work for them?