A PUBLIC WEBRARIAN

The great thing about the Web—its ephemeral nature—may also be its biggest liability. Today's hit home pages evaporate into electrons as soon as they've outlived their utility. How can you keep track of a medium with no sense of history? Brewster Kahle thinks he has an answer. Kahle, pioneer of the early wais Net search engine, is building Internet Archive (www.archive.org), dedicated to preserving a digital record of the ever changing array of online content. With the help of a tape robot, he's spent a year storing some 3 terabytes (3,000 gigabytes) of Web data for research. "I thought it was time to build another piece of the publishing structure," he says. "We had virtual bookstores and newsstands, but no library." As much a capitalist as an altruist, Kahle has started a for-profit firm, ALEXA Internet, to help historians when Yahoo! just can't do the job.
—Dan Cray et al., "Two model netizens," Time, June 1997