Corbis Image Library

Aspirations of a "digital Alexandria" are by no means limited to the academic world. In the private sector, the Corbis Corporation, owned by American billionaire Bill Gates, pursues the largest endeavour of this kind. In 1995, Corbis, termed Gates's "image bank empire," announced that it had acquired The Bettman Archive, one of the world's largest image libraries, which consists of over sixteen million photographic images. Doug Rowin, CEO of Corbis, has announced that the company's objective is to "capture the entire human experience throughout history" (Hafner 88-90). Microsoft is spending millions of dollars to digitise the huge resource being collected by Corbis from individuals and institutions, making it available online for a copy charge. The idea of one man, the wealthiest on earth, owning so much of the reproduction process not only makes many nervous (if not paranoid), but also contradicts the democratic potential of the medium. Charles Mauzy, director of media development for the Bill Gates-owned company, has said that the "the mandate is to build a comprehensive visual encyclopaedia, a Britannica without body text" (Rappaport, "In His Image").

The archive, around which all of Corbis' activities centre, consists of approximately a million digital images. It is growing at a rate of forty thousand images a month, as pictures from various realms of human endeavour-history, the arts, entertainment, nature, and science-are digitised. So far, it has largely focused on photographic acquisition, with work from such renowned professionals such as Ansel Adams, Galen Rowell, Laura Dwight, Shelley Gazin, and Roger Ressmeyer. In addition, Corbis has commissioned several dozen photographers to work around the world to fill the Corbis catalogue-an increasingly sought-after assignment. Corbis also holds archival material from the Library of Congress, rare Civil War photos from the Medford Historical Society in Oregon, as well as nineteenth and early twentieth century photo portraiture from the Pach Brothers, as well as works from dozens of other collections. But what got the art world to finally pay attention is Corbis's amassment of rights to digital images from museums, including works from institutions such as Saint Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, the National Gallery of London, the Royal Ontario Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Japan's Sakamoto archive, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the 16 million item Bettmann Archive, which houses one of the world's richest collections of drawings, motion pictures, and other historic materials (Rappaport, "In His Image").

In early July 1996, Corbis, which was already online with its digital gallery, opened its archive directly to commercial customers. Armed with a T1 connection and a password supplied by Corbis, these clients can access the database directly and search for images by subject, artist, date, or keyword. Once the images are presented online, they are culled; selected images can be ordered with a mouse click. Because of the shortage of bandwidth and the length of time it takes to download images averaging 35 Mbytes each, orders are sent out overnight on custom-cut CD-ROMs. All images are watermarked to ensure against further unauthorised use (Lash, "Corbis Reaches Out"). This notion of delivering digital online content is one of the few constants at Corbis and has driven the company since its inception in 1989. Established as Gates's "content company," it was chartered to acquire a digitised art collection that Gates planned to display on the high-definition television screens installed at his futuristic waterfront stronghold near Seattle. But the philosophical underpinning of Corbis and its earlier incarnations-first Interactive Home Systems and then Continuum-was based on a grander notion, namely Gates's belief that just as software replaced hardware as technology's most valuable product, so too will content eventually replace instruction sets as the basis of digital value (Lash, "Corbis Reaches Out").

In late 1994, Gates stunned the art world with an audacious 30.8 million dollar bid at a Christie's auction for one of Leonardo da Vinci's extraordinary illustrated notebooks, known as Codex Leicester. Fears that the treasure would end up hidden away from public view were quashed when Continuum bought the rights to existing photographic images of the Codex from their joint owners, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Centre and photographer Seth Joel. One of Corbis's first major CD-ROM productions was on da Vinci's fifteenth-century notebooks in which he visually mused about art, music, science, and engineering, sketching prototypes of the parachute, modern woodwinds, the tank, the helicopter, and much more (Rappaport, "In His Image").

Microsoft is not limited to hoarding art related images, as evidenced by its TerraServer, which is dedicated to collecting aerial photographs and satellite images of the earth. The TerraServer boasts more data than all the HTML pages on the Internet, and if put into a paper atlas would be equal to two thousand volumes of five hundred pages each. Quantities of information are becoming truly manifest, and even the Internet is being catalogued and backed up for posterity (TerraServer).