Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive gave a great keynote talk at Museums and the Web in San Francisco. He’s completely convinced that the technological issues of archiving everything - texts, images, audio, video, software, etc. - and archiving them forever, are ‘doable.’ The main barriers to doing this are (yup) lack of social, legal, and political will. He focused in particular on the problems caused by the locking up of content into various intellectual property, copyright, and digital rights management agreements, and he described the open content model (Open Content Alliance).

Open content has many advantages, both for users, and also for preservation, as the number of copies in existence increases. It would be interesting to see what we have in NSDL that satisfies IA’s criteria, and perhaps have this as a specific ‘Open NSDL’ collection.

Brewster described the IA’s ongoing book digitization efforts, which is scanning public domain books. He passed around a version of the $100 laptop, which has a flippable 200 dpi screen that rotates and turns the machine into an ebook, which displays the scanned books. Very cool.