As an idealistic technologist studying at MIT in the ’80s, Brewster Kahle was enthralled by the possibilities the internet offered. In 1996, he established the Internet Archive, which he hoped would become “the Library of Alexandria for the digital age.” Today, this free digital resource is used by 1.5 million people daily for its vast, crowdsourced collections of books, live concerts, television shows, software programs and audio recordings. Its most popular project, the Wayback Machine, allows anyone to access its archive of over 600 billion web pages that would otherwise have disappeared into the ether. Here, Kahle explains the human effort that goes into running a digital behemoth.  

PIP USHER: How do you collect content for the Internet Archive? 

BREWSTER KAHLE: There are n...