For Immediate Release: March 10, 2004

Internet Pioneer Brewster Kahle to receive Paul Evan Peters Award

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that Brewster Kahle, founder and chairman of the board of the Internet Archive, has been named the recipient of the 2004 Paul Evan Peters Award. The award—named for CNI's founding director—honors Kahle’s rare combination of strategic vision, technical innovation, and humanitarian outlook. It also recognizes his lasting achievements in the creation and use of information resources and services to advance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Nancy Eaton, Dean of University Libraries at Pennsylvania State University and chair of the nominating committee for the award, praised Kahle for his "positive and lasting impact on scholarly communication."

A long-time proponent of the transformative power of digital libraries for human culture, Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996 to provide "universal access to all human knowledge." In cooperation with institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Science Foundation, the Archive preserves and provides access to Web sites, movies, music, and more—currently some 30 billion pages of information—that might otherwise disappear forever from the ever-changing digital universe. Researchers, historians, and the general public have access to archived Web pages from 1996 to the present via a searching service called the "Wayback Machine." ARL Executive Director Duane Webster expressed his admiration for Kahle's work: "Brewster's creativity has led to innovative approaches to the use of technology that expand the scope and reach of libraries and archives. In doing so, he has helped to establish a true global community of scholars and students sharing information."

"The accomplishments of the Internet Archive are incredibly important," said Cliff Lynch, Director of CNI, reflecting on Kahle’s contributions. "We have had no dearth of people explaining why digital preservation was difficult and important. But when people in the future want to understand what was actually being done during the period of the Web’s first blossoming in the latter 1990s, they will be able to do so largely because of Brewster’s leadership and vision in establishing the Internet Archive."

Kahle believes that technology should be used to allow human creativity to flower, and he has managed to put this idea into practice for twenty years. As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kahle studied artificial intelligence. After graduating in 1982, he helped found Thinking Machines, a supercomputer manufacturer, where he worked as an engineer for six years. In the 1980s Kahle invented a system for publishing and disseminating information via the Internet. His system, known as WAIS (Wide Area Information Server), was purchased in 1995 by America Online, giving Kahle the resources to found the Internet Archive. Later, Kahle founded Alexa Internet, a company involved in collaborative search and resource description, which was acquired by Amazon.

More recently, Kahle's devotion to bringing the world's cultural heritage to as broad an audience as possible has sparked another innovative project—the deployment of "Internet bookmobiles". The bookmobiles use satellites, laptops, and high-speed printers to download and print books for people all over the world who lack easy access to bookstores and traditional libraries.

Brewster Kahle has long been part of the CNI community; he presented plenary addresses at Coalition meetings in 1992 and 1998. Kahle will receive the Paul Evan Peters Award and deliver a plenary address at the Spring 2004 CNI Task Force Meeting, to be held April 15-16, in Alexandria, Virginia. Previous recipients of the award are Vinton Cerf (2002) and Tim Berners-Lee (2000).

Three nonprofit organizations, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE, sponsor the Paul Evan Peters Award, which was established with additional funding from Microsoft and Xerox Corporations. CNI is a coalition of some 200 member institutions dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. ARL's membership includes the leading research libraries in North America. Its mission is to shape and influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication, promoting equitable access to and effective use of recorded knowledge in support of teaching, research, scholarship, and community service. EDUCAUSE is an association of nearly 1,900 colleges, universities, and education organizations whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

The award honors the memory and accomplishments of Paul Evan Peters (1947-1996). Peters was a visionary and a coalition builder in higher education and the world of scholarly communication. He led CNI from its founding in 1990 with informed insight, exuberant direction, eloquence, and awareness of the needs of its varied constituencies of librarians, technologists, publishers, and others in the digital world. In December 1999 Peters was named one of the 100 most important leaders in twentieth-century librarianship by the American Library Association.

For more information, see:
Paul Evan Peters Award Home
or contact:
Joan K. Lippincott, Associate Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
21 Dupont Circle
Washington, DC 20036
joan@cni.org
202-296-5098