World Drowning in Oceans of Data
Written by Haitham Sabbah on 31. October 2003, 1711hrs // Part of Haitham Sabbah's adventure in Knowledge Management // Other posts by Haitham Sabbah
The equivalent of a 30-foot pile of books of data is produced for everyone on Earth annually, a study finds.
US researchers estimate that every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet. Their study found that information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999.
Paper is still proving popular though. The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in three years.
Study authors Prof Peter Lyman and colleagues found that in 2002 alone about five exabytes of new information was generated by the worlds print, film, magnetic and optical storage systems.
By comparison the US Library of Congress print collection, comprising 19 million books and 56 million manuscripts, equates to about 10 terabytes of information.
It would take 500,000 Libraries of Congress to equal five exabytes.
Source: BBC News
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