While it may not be the Library of Alexandria, it contains more information than that great temple of learning did. And it fits onto 44 tapes.
The Library of Congress on Tuesday unveiled a sculpture of the Web donated by Alexa. Located in the Library of Congress Digital Library visitor center, it flashes random pages taken from the more than 500,000 Web sites archived by Alexa since 1996.
"The Library of Congress keeps much of the nation's creative materials, so we thought we should be preserving the electronic material as well," said library spokesman Guy Lamolinara.
Alexa first contacted the library in 1997 about making a donation of its Web archives. Rather than just handing over the 44 tapes in a plain cardboard box, the company commissioned an interactive digital sculpture. Digital artist Alan Rath used the tapes and four monitors to create "World Wide Web 1997: 2 Terabytes in 63 inches."
"We look at it not only as a donation, but as a lab experiment," said Lamolinara, adding that the library would, over time, investigate different uses for the material.
If users want hands-on interaction with the materials, they'll have to wait. No one at the library is yet sure how to deal with such a mass of information, and no front end has been built to comb through it. Alexa has no plans to help codify the snapshot.
"Our main point was, as long as we're gathering this stuff, let's put it somewhere where it will get care and feeding," said Bruce Gilliat, co-founder and general manager of Alexa.
"We haven't written code that lets people search through terabytes of information," Gilliat said. "It's as if we can direct someone to the right section, hall, or aisle, but not give the exact Dewey decimal number."
The library's larger task may be deciding what's relevant. The library, after all, is not in the business of preserving the mountain of written materials generated in offices around the world.
"We don't even do that with analog material," said Lamolinara. "A lot of people think we have every book printed, but that's just not true."
Alexa was founded in 1996 when Gilliat and Brewster Kahle, now the president, grew frustrated with the search engines available on the Net. They wondered what would happen if the "community of users could effortlessly pool [their] collective experience and add human intelligence to navigation."
The result of that pursuit has been Alexa. From the company's San Francisco base, computers crawl the Internet, looking at every available page and indexing and archiving the content.
Users read the Alexa archives via a toolbar that functions inside the user's browser. When a user visits a site, Alexa recognizes the location, identifies related links, and allows the user to comment on the site. If a site is no longer live, the toolbar suggests an archived version, if one is available.
Gilliat feels the company, now 35 employees strong, provides more than the navigational tool. Alexa's Web snapshots can offer a clearer view of the growing datastream that is the Web, he said. 300,000 domains in 1996 to over a million in 1998 is a big task.
With the donation to the Library of Congress, at least some of the data has a permanent home.
