The following is an excerpt from The New York Times. The full article by David Streitfeld is available to read here.

The Internet Archive occupies a converted church in San Francisco’s Richmond District.Credit David Rinehart.

Brewster Kahle is a librarian by training and temperament. In the mid-1990s, when many saw the nascent World Wide Web as a place to sell things, he saw it as data that cried out to be preserved and cataloged. Later, he widened his scope to include material — film, books, music — that was not native to the web but could be digitally gathered there.

By most standards, Mr. Kahle has been pretty successful. The Internet Archive serves from two to three million visitors a day with such tools as the Wayback Machine, which provides snapshots of 435 billion Web pages saved over time. The archive has seven million texts (you could call them books), 2.1 million audio recordings, and 1.8 million videos. It is an immense library.

Mr. Kahle has even bigger dreams, however. With a limited staff, the archive can conserve only so much. But if anyone can become a curator, the archive may one day resemble one of those Borgesian fantasies of the Total Library, a place that not only collects the world but becomes it.

“We thought the machines were going to save us — crawling the web, digitizing the books, organizing the information — but we were wrong,” Mr. Kahle said. “Communities of people are at the heart of curation.”

At an event Tuesday night at the converted San Francisco church that serves as the archive’s headquarters, the nonprofit’s staff showed off exactly how it and communities are going to be “building libraries together.”

To learn more about the project ideas being discussed surrounding community building of even more diverse digital archives, read the full article over on The New York Times website.