IT HAS been said that one of the great losses of the ancient world was the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It housed some of the literate world’s great documents, estimated to have been around 400,000 scrolls at its height. Then Julius Caesar lit Alexandria on fire in 48 BC and the library burned to the ground.

One of the great treasures of the contemporary world is an online library called the Internet Archive (IA). Established in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a US digital librarian, computer engineer from MIT, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge.

This makes him a champion of the commons. And the public online library he has built is a wonder of the modern world. As of September 5 2024, the Internet Archive held over 866 billion web pages, more than 42.5 million print materials, 13 million videos, 3 million TV news, 1.2 million software programmes, 14 million audio files, 5 million images, and 272,660 concerts in its Wayback Machine.