The Mother of all Libraries

Once upon a time, long, long ago there lived a man called Abdul Kassem Ismael. As the Grand Vizier of Persia and a renowned statesman and soldier, Ismael was perpetually on the move. Since Ismael loved reading, he always travelled with 400 blinking, odorous camels who carried his 1,17,000 volume library wherever he went. Hard to believe this, but a book in this vast mobile library could be located almost instantly. Simply because Ismael’s hirsute humps were trained to walk in alphabetical order…

Thousands of moons later, humankind has invented little silicon humps called computers. And the Internet. And there are scores of libraries on the Internet today. And they fetch what you want in a trice—without the assistance of odorous, alphabetically-arranged, plodding quadrupeds and blinking gaze. Of the nearly two billion odd websites, microsites and hyperlinks that currently make up the DNA of our cyberspace, perhaps one of the most amazing of repositories is a site called the Internet Archive at www.archive.org. It is quite the mother of all libraries.

The Internet Archive was born in ’96 as a non-profit Internet library, with the purpose of providing researchers, historians, and scholars, access to historical collections in digital format. Since then the library has grown to become large multimedia archive. It includes moving images (movies, TV shows, video, animations), books, audio recordings (including recordings of live concerts from bands that allow it), "snapshots of the World Wide Web" (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software.

The idea behind the Archive is to try and change the content of the Internet from “ephemera to enduring artifacts of our political and cultural lives”, protect our “right to know”, and help us exercise our "right to remember". In a nutshell, it is an endeavour to preserve "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. The Archive collaborates with institutions like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian in this effort.

Battleship Potemkin, Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness, Computer Chronicles, Net Café... Yeah, classic public domain feature films, war films, westerns, cartoons, open source movies, advertising, educational, industrial, amateur and home movie collections, popular television programmes... There's a whole load of stuff out there for those who have the patience to dig and download. All legal and licenced. But free. (Gaming freaks, jump to www.archive.org/details/gamevideos straight away and download a feast of game videos.)

The audio section holds Live Music Archive (30,000 downloads of high quality live concerts in a lossless format), Netlabels (8,000 complete, freely downloadable/streamable, mostly Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of 'virtual record labels'), Open Source Audio and hazzar other crazy and not-so-crazy stuff.

The text section has thousands and thousands of free books for download, everything from the Canadian Libraries to the Million Book Project to Open Source Books to Project Gutenberg to Children's Library and the classic Arpanet. There’s loads of software in the Software section too. But no space to talk about here now. So just zip in and take a look…

If you've been following my weekly meanderings here, you would recall my writing about Web 2.0, the next level of web applications. Well, here are three more exciting Ajax-based samples: Writely, a web-based word-processor (www.writely.com); NumSum, a web-based spreadsheet (http://numsum.com); and Voo2do, a site that "offers advanced task and priority management for busy, ambitious individuals" (http://voo2do.com). These are full-blown applications, fully functional and totally free. But hey, mind what you feed your spreadsheet here as it offers no privacy from prying eyes (human, not camel)…