JISCMail - RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK Archives

Barbara,

I use the following information from University of Berkeley's report "How Much Information? 2003" to help people visualise their documents and records. In a similar question I posed to the list I was also referred to http://www.archivebuilders.com/. I have also, in the past worked, on the basis One filing cabinet = 10,000 pages or 1GB = 2 filing cabinets although I can no longer recall where I got that from.

Regards,

Susan

Susan Mansfield
Records Manager
Strategy Directorate
Scottish Enterprise
150 Broomielaw
5 Atlantic Quay
Glasgow
G2 8LU
Direct Line: 0141 228 2468
Fax 0141221 3217
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

How big is five exabytes? If digitized, the nineteen million books and other print collections in the

Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is

equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of

Congress print collections.

It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper.

Table 1.1: How Big is an Exabyte?

Kilobyte (KB)

1,000 bytes OR 103bytes

2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page (we often calculate this as reams of paper and work out how far down e.g. Church Street it would stretch using the Gmap pedometer http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/)

100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph.

Megabyte (MB)

1,000,000 bytes OR 106 bytes

1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk.

2 Megabytes: A high-resolution photograph.

5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare. (we use the latest Harry Potter novel as a comparison!)

10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound.

100 Megabytes: 1 meter of shelved books.

500 Megabytes: A CD-ROM.

Gigabyte (GB)

1,000,000,000 bytes OR 109 bytes

1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with books.

20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven.

100 Gigabytes: A library floor of academic journals.

Terabyte (TB)

1,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1012 bytes

1 Terabyte: 50000 trees made into paper and printed.

2 Terabytes: An academic research library.

10 Terabytes: The print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress

400 Terabytes: National Climactic Data Center (NOAA) database.

Petabyte (PB)

1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes

1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001).

2 Petabytes: All U.S. academic research libraries.

20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995.

200 Petabytes: All printed material.

Exabyte (EB)

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes

2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999.

5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.

Source: Many of these examples were taken from Roy Williams “Data Powers of Ten” web page at Caltech.

A tree can produce about 80,500 sheets of paper,

Hi, I want to illustrate the volume of digitally borne (eg WORD, PDF, jpgs) in a physical form i.e. what would 1.5 million documents stored on a shared network drive look like or another comparison is what would 400Gb of documents stored on a shared network drive look like. I am looking for a physical comparison to what this would look like in paper form. A comparison in say, length or volume would be good e.g. documents laid end to end would be “x” miles or a comparison in size say, it would fill “x” (full length) filling cabinets.

Does anyone have any nifty formulas for working out a rough comparison from digitally borne documents into a physical form ?

Thank you,

Barbara McGrath

Information Officer

Fareham Borough Council

www.fareham.gov.uk

01329 824529