Courtesy of Brewster Kahle

Curiosity Expert: Brewster Kahle

Digital Librarian and Founder of the Internet Archive

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A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: making information free and accessible through digital means.

While a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Kahle studied artificial intelligence. Soon after graduating, he helped found the company Thinking Machines, a supercomputer maker. In 1989, Mr. Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and established WAIS, Inc. With The Wall Street Journal as a first customer, the company helped revolutionize the electronic publishing market and Mr. Kahle eventually sold the company to America Online. In 1996, Mr. Kahle founded the Internet Archive, the largest digital archive in the world. With a staff of nearly 300, and 100 partnering libraries, the organization is working to create an online catalog of every book ever created. Also, in 1996 Mr. Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, a service that collects data on web browsing behavior for future analysis, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.

Mr. Kahle received a B.S. in computer science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Mary Austin started the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which supports the Internet Archive along with other non-profit organizations with similar goals. Additionally, Mr. Kahle is the founder of Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts.

Mr. Kahle is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive. Mr. Kahle is an advisory board member of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program of the Library of Congress, and is a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure. Mr. Kahle is the recipient of the 2004 IP3 Award from Public Knowledge, 2009 Free Software Foundation Award and the Paul Evan Peters Award, which is offered jointly from the Coalition of Networked Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE. In 2009, Mr. Kahle was named by Utne Reader as one of the "50 Visionaries Changing Your World."