[Ads-l] Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years - Brewster Kahle

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Article: I Set Out to Build the Next Library of Alexandria. Now I
Wonder: Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years?
Author: Brewster Kahle (Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive)
Date: Oct 22, 2021

https://time.com/6108581/internet-archive-future-books/

[Begin excerpt]
When I started the Internet Archive 25 years ago, I focused our
non-profit library on digital collections: preserving web pages,
archiving television news, and digitizing books. The Internet Archive
was seen as innovative and unusual. Now all libraries are increasingly
electronic, and necessarily so. To fight disinformation, to serve
readers during the pandemic, and to be relevant to 21st-century
learners, libraries must become digital.

But just as the Web increased people’s access to information
exponentially, an opposite trend has evolved. Global media
corporations—emboldened by the expansive copyright laws they helped
craft and the emerging technology that reaches right into our reading
devices—are exerting absolute control over digital information. These
two conflicting forces—towards unfettered availability and completely
walled access to information—have defined the last 25 years of the
Internet. How we handle this ongoing clash will define our civic
discourse in the next 25 years. If we fail to forge the right path,
publishers’ business models could eliminate one of the great tools for
democratizing society: our independent libraries.
[End excerpt]

Follow the link to see the rest of the article.
Garson

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