Appreciation for Preservation at Physical Archive Event

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Brewster Kahle, at left, guides celebrants through a tour of the Physical Archive in Richmond, California.
“Welcome to the Physical Archive!”

On a tour October 22, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, shared his enthusiasm for the industrial building in Richmond, California, that serves as a forever home for millions of items donated for digital preservation. He walked curious visitors through the life cycle of books and media being collected and scanned as part of the mission to provide universal access to knowledge.

“We wanted to go and digitize everything, ever, and make it as available to everybody as we possibly could. How hard could it be?” Kahle said. After setting out to get one digital copy of image masking service everything published, the Archive found donors often didn’t want the physical copies back. That meant finding a secure location to fill shipping containers with the materials including books, music, videos, periodicals, magazines, microfilm, microfiche, CD-ROMs, and interactive laser discs.

The annual tour highlighted the storage space, film preservation lab and demonstrations of sorting and scanning processes. The free event also included exhibits of rare books, vintage records and technology from the vast collection.


“I’ve always wanted to come here. It’s just mind-blowing,” said Klein Lieu, an engineering manager for a software company in Oakland who attended the event. “You walk through the shipping containers and it’s like the modern-day Library of Alexandria. You don’t want it to burn down.”

Lieu, 34, is a monthly donor who said he’s used the Internet Archive since he was 8 years old—randomly looking up old blogs and websites he made of his favorite cartoons as a kid, and later for academic purposes. In the film lab, he marveled at footage of New York City from the 1950s that was being digitized. “I’m in awe of the entire experience,” he said. “Millions and millions of these stories, art works, and code that is all preserved is actually very touching.”

Jen Mico, a film scanner, described the importance of the archival process to visitors at the event.

“It’s really important to have an actual human here being the bridge between the film, which was created 70 years ago, and creating this digital file, which will be disseminated to whoever wants to see it. It’s pretty great,” Mico said.