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.

Source: The Internet Archive, Trying to Encompass All Creation – The New York Times