Video: A digital library, free to the world

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -- every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history ... It's all free to the public -- unless someone else gets to it first.

Brewster Kahle is an inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian. The Internet Archive, which he founded and directs, offers 85 billion pieces of deep Web geology -- a fascinating look at the formation of the Internet over the years, and a challenge to those who would keep knowledge buried.

Brewster Kahle's stated goal is "Universal access to all knowledge," and his catalog of inventions and institutions created for this purpose read like a Web's Greatest Hits list. In 1982 he helped start Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company specializing in text searching, and would go on to invent the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS, whose customers included the New York Times and the United States Senate.