Oct. 4, 2002, Great American Bookmobile Convention, Columbus, Ohio

Raj Reddy -- "god of computer science" is how Kahle describes him -- has trained generations of technologists at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He has laid down the gauntlet for "universal access to human knowledge" (the phrase is his). His vision is to put a million public-domain books online and he has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the effort. As the bookmobile travels the U.S., a ship carrying a container filled with Reddy's books is headed for China for a mass scanning effort. Even when scanning by the containerful, a million is a lot of books.

To grow from 20,000 to 1 million, the Million Book Project needs to change from the obsession of a few gifted computer scientists to a widespread, decentralized movement. Kahle wants people to bring their personal documents -- grandfather's book, letters found in an attic -- to him. The digital library needs librarians. We found them at the Great American Bookmobile Conference.

"We don't even know what treasures are out there in books that are out of print and still under copyright. Every book has some value even if it's just to the author and his descendents. We need to open our libraries so kids can learn from the full breadth of our knowledge," Kahle says.

Michael Hart's line -- "The Internet brings the history of the world to your town and the history of your town to the world" -- strikes a chord with the librarians. One attendee of the conference is a clerk with a rural Pennsylvania library that prides itself on its genealogy collections. "People come from all over the world to research their ancestry," she says. "We're looking for a system to digitize our books. Some of them are quite rare, all of them are getting dog-eared. This answers everything we've been looking for."

Since Kahle is volunteering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, "we can scan all this stuff, put it on the Web, and people can view it without having to travel to us. Then if they want to see the originals, they can still come to the library."

Oct. 5, 2002, Pittsburgh

It's still four days until the big day at the Supreme Court. We still have books to make at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and schools in Baltimore and Washington. Many of us are exhausted from covering 2,000 miles in four days, but Brewster is even more invigorated than ever. He can't wait to stand beneath the stone-carved words "FREE FOR THE PEOPLE" that adorn the Carnegie and make books. The slogan, idealistic as it may be, fairly captures Brewster's wildest dreams for the Net. A massive library containing the full breadth of human knowledge and experience, freely and easily accessible to everyone on the planet. A library truly free to the people.

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