On May 24, 2011, a lecture by Mr. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive (IA), was held by the National Diet Library (NDL), attracting a large audience.

Known in Japan for its Wayback Machine, which preserves and makes available past websites, IA is a nonprofit organization which provides digital archives of websites, movies and sound, as well as digitizing books. Mr. Kahle, a vocal advocate of making information free and accessible through digital means, gave a lecture fittingly titled "Universal Access to All Knowledge" at the Tokyo Main Library.

In his lecture, Mr. Kahle talked about the achievement of "Universal Access to all knowledge" with a focus on the present state of the IA.

Having introduced several initiatives such as "Book Mobile" and print-on-demand in developing countries, various reading platforms for people with visual impairment and scanning centers of the IA in six countries in the world, he explained about OpenLibrary (http://openlibrary.org/). He contended for making the purchased e-books and in-copyright digitized materials accessible as well as making digitized old books in the public domain available in cooperation with affiliated libraries (about 150 libraries at the time) in OpenLibrary in a step-by-step manner.

He also talked about IA's experience to make a great digital library which anybody can freely access, introducing each media type such as books, music, movies, websites etc. To preserve their digital data, he said that IA puts multiple copies in several organizations around the world such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

At the end of the lecture, Mr. Kahle donated websites data related to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the resultant tsunami collected by IA to Dr. Nagao, Librarian of the NDL.

After the lecture, a three-way discussion was conducted between Mr. Kahle, Prof. Soichi Tokizane (Professor of Aichi University) and Dr. Makoto Nagao (Librarian of the National Diet Library). They talked about the IA as a nonprofit organization, the difference between IA and Google, the agendas and strategy to cope with copyright issues, issues of web-archiving, "physical archive" which was opened on June 5 by IA etc., based on questions submitted by the audience.