Open Library

A few classes ago we discussed the obscure prefixes used to describe very large amounts of data. My own conception of computer storage is pretty limited. My base of comparison is my iPod, and even its 30 GB overwhelms me. I've loaded my entire music collection on to the thing and I'm still left with 22 GB of space in which to expand. When I bought a flash drive this morning for school (in order to break myself of the sloppy habit of constantly emailing my documents to myself) I thought "okay, 2 GB, that's a quarter of my iTunes library." I find a blank word document daunting, I'm not at all sure how to approach producing enough content to fill 2 GB of empty space.

Brewster Kahle doesn't have that problem. As the founder of Internet Archive he's already using more than 2 Petabytes of data. That's two quadrillion bytes (I was going to calculate some astronomical number of 30 GB iPods to illustrate this figure, but I'm frightened off by all those zeros. I trust the number is, however, astronomical). Of course Google processes ten times that in a day, but I'm not trying to segue to Google. I'm trying to segue to Brewster Kahle's latest project, the Open Content Alliance.

Brewster Kahle's stated goal is nothing short of "Universal access to all knowledge" and the Open Content Alliance is a major step in that direction. The Open Content Alliance is an organization working to digitize the collections of a consortium of major academic and national libraries. Participants include the Boston Library Consortium, The British Library, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the National Library of Australia, the University of Chicago Library. Unlike a similar project sponsored by Google (Google Book Search), the Open Content Alliance is open to searches from any search engine and is managed as a nonprofit organization, quelling potential concerns about the commercialization of public-domain content.

Currently the Boston Public Library has ten scanners working to digitize its collection. Title are made available for download at Open Library, an open-source database of book records that anyone can modify or search for scanned books. That's where I got this page from Moby Dick about eating whales.