The Internet Archive and Open Library are related projects to put books on-line. The inspiration and motivation behind them is seasoned entrepreneur Brewster Kahle. The project itself will prove to be a wonderful resource and it is being approached in the spirit of liberty of which the web was born. Unlike Google’s project, which will only display part of a book and will cost, this will give access to the contents of the world’s libraries. Of course recent publications which are still copyright protected will be unavailable, but much of that will increasingly have substitutes on-line.
Part of the project is the Wayback Machine which has archived websites. The web has changed so much, it can be a bit freaky. For example, all the astraea.net archives are here. I checked out the original astraea site … woah – blast from the past!
See The Economist’s review The internet’s librarian.
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