Saved – Frank McNally on a former church that houses the Internet Archive

In a church in San Francisco on Sunday, I peered through a side-door to see what at first looked like a congregation frozen in prayer: all of them standing with backs to the side walls, peering silently across the empty pews.

It was an eerie spectacle, even after the realisation dawned that none of the figures were real. They turned out to be sculptures by an Irish artist, a subject to which I’ll return. But first to the church, which is a story in itself.

Built in 1923 by the Christian Science movement, the magnificent Greek Revivalist building had become by the 21st century far too large for a dwindling congregation. So in 2009 it was sold to the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library based until then in the nearby Presidio district.

Management of the Archive didn’t need a church. But the Greek-style frontage bore a pleasing resemblance to their existing logo, inspired by the Great Library of Alexandria. The religious setting muse have had an amusing irony too.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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In the Garden of Eden, all knowledge was contained in the fruit of a tree, eating which was forbidden. The Internet Archive is a modern equivalent of the tree. It aims to provide nothing less than “universal access to all knowledge”.

But this is an era when the democratisation of knowledge is considered a good thing. Except for a few lawsuits from book publishers and the grumbles of traditional libraries, the Archive is generally considered to be on the side of the angels.

The statistics are increasingly celestial too. Since its Genesis in 1996, the project has archived more than 750 billion web pages, 41 million books, 15 million audio recordings, and a vast amount more.

Its Open Library now has 1.4 million volumes – published before 1925 and so in the public domain – digitised and available to borrow free, complete with a “text-search” facility: invaluable for independent scholars, not to mention daily newspaper columnists who need to appear better read than they are at short notice.

An art installation alongside the church’s former altar, now a stage, depicts the World Wide Web of 1997 via a stack of ancient computer screens and their piled-up memory banks: “Two terabytes in 63 inches”.

That would fit on a single USB now. The IA’s current collection, meanwhile, is measured in petabytes, about 100 of them, which makes it 50,000 times larger than a quarter of a century ago.

The challenge of archiving the entire internet is an ever-more complex thing, fraught with Facebook, newspaper paywalls, and even the constant redesign of websites, which can obliterate historic content.

War is a threat too. Current priorities include preserving the precarious record of independent journalism in Russia and Iran. But even the volatility of US politics is a concern. In November 2016, just after Donald Trump’s election as US president, the IA announced plans to build a back-up copy of its collection in Canada.

Like all churches, the decommissioned one in San Francisco depends on servers and volunteers. The servers in this case are of the computer variety, most housed in the building itself. The volunteers are human, many working remotely, scanning materials all over the world.

But getting back to the “congregation” mentioned earlier, which on closer inspection proved to be 100 per cent ceramic. Only the people depicted are real. And their immortalisation in this form is a tribute: the permanent (and growing) exhibition being of past and current employees of the Internet Archive, with a minimum three years’ service.

The Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle got the idea after visiting China and seeing the Terra Cotta warriors. He then commissioned Dublin-born sculptor Nuala Creed – well named for work in a church – to create the figures, beginning in 2010.

To date, Creed has replicated more than 140 archivists, each portrayed in typical attire and holding objects – including a model aeroplane, knitting needles, and a skull – reflecting hobbies or interests.

They include at least one internet martyr: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013), an activist for open access generally who took his own life aged 26 after being convicted on charges relating to a mass download of academic material from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Elsewhere in the church, a separate, temporary exhibit concerns Original Sin. In a polite protest at the fitting up of Eve as biblical fall-girl, a bank of screens flashes thousands of images glorifying the human female in all her shapes and colours.

Among the fleeting figures, I noticed Sinéad O’Connor, a troupe of Irish dancers, and a Sheela-na-Gig. These and the countless other Eves are all featured on Apples, but of the Californian computer variety.