Arch.org creator builds Noah's Ark for printed books

Today I came across very interesting news: Brewster Calais, the creator of the archive.org service , often referred to as the Internet Archive, creates a print book repository where he hopes to collect all the books he has ever printed, one copy of each book. If anyone has heard of the World Seed Repository on Svalbard , one can trace the analogy between the two projects. By the way, Brewster Calais has already begun to carry out his project, and has collected about 500 thousand books.

Its first repository may well fit up to a million copies of books, after which the construction of a larger repository will begin. Books here do not stand on shelves, but are stored in special containers, each of which is equipped with climate control. Each container fits up to 40 thousand volumes. In order to facilitate the classification of stored books, each of them is given its own barcode. Barcodes also indicate containers.

Brewster claims that he collected the first 500 thousand books with such ease that he sees no difficulty in accumulating 10 million copies of publications - and this is already the equivalent of a large university library. The idea, as mentioned above, is to store all ever printed books in a single copy. Of course, the work on collecting and classifying books is not carried out by Brewster himself, but by specially trained personnel. The project participants, before placing the book in the repository, enter it into the database. Sometimes there are copies of books that are already in the repository - in which case Brewster gives these books to various organizations.

Brewster considers digitization to be a completely reliable way of preserving books, but he also claims that, for greater safety, printed books must also be taken care of. Brewster Calais is also the initiator of the Open Library project, a digital library that the author of the project considers an analogue of the famous Alexandria library. As part of the Open Library project, about 3 million books have already been digitized, each of which can be obtained free of charge by any Web user who is interested in any publication from this library.

Kale believes that his project for the storage of printed books is not an analogue of the Library of Congress, but an analogue of the seed repository mentioned above.

Via Yahoo